This project involves the research of a cultural anthropologist from Princeton University, studying how Tibetan women use traditional Tibetan medicine as a means of cultural revitalization under conditions of state-directed Sinicized modernization. Specifically, it explores the extent to which women associate use of Tibetan medicine for reproductive and gynecological disorders with efforts to ensure the survival of Tibetan culture in the face of Chinese hegemonic practices. The work will focus on six months of data collection in the women's ward of a health facility in Lhasa where the idioms used by women for discussing biological, social, political and cultural discontent are drawn from traditional Tibetan epistemologies concerning the body, the nature of suffering, and the relation between ethics, biology, and cultural identity. The investigator will interview patients and families about their diseases, treatments, and other factors they consider relevant to their conditions. Physicians as well as traditional healers will be interviewed and observed as they deal with patients. The project will provide data on this relatively unknown area of women's health in Tibet, will advance our understanding of the links between ethnic revitalization and ethnomedicine in the important area of the world.
