Hidden Paradises of the Himalaya

“A distant view of a snowy range…has a strange power of moving all poets and persons of imagination,” wrote Douglas Freshfield in his 1903 memoir, Round Kangchenjunga. The British mountaineer was describing his vision of the 8586-meter Mt. Kangchenjunga from the hill-station of Darjeeling. Kangchenjunga is the third highest mountain in the world and has …

Gesar’s Therapeutic Geographies

This article explores how practices of healing or information about medicine operate in the Gesar epic. I begin with a discussion of a few relevant examples from commonly known Gesar episodes, proposing that beyond being of significant interest in themselves, these stories may be rich sources for questioning how the category of ‘medicine’ may be …

Studies of Medical Pluralism

Sienna Craig, Mingji Coumo, Frances Garrett and Mona Schrempf (Editors):  Studies of Medical Pluralism in Tibetan History and Society [PIATS 2006: Proceedings of the Eleventh Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies. Königswinter 2006.], 2010, 470 pages, 76,50 Euro. ISBN: 978-3-03809-108-0 The two Tibetan medical panels at the XIth seminar at Königswinter, Germany, in 2006 included thirty-four papers …