Archiving the Pandemic
Saber(com)vida
Thinking through complex webs of potency
Barbara Gerke
Medicine Anhropology Theory
Overview
An anthropologist's reflection on the responses to the Covid -19 pandemic in Dharamsala, India, place of exile of the Dalai Lama and Buddhism pilgrimage site. Through the encounter between biomedicine and public health and traditional Tibetan medicine, the author explores the intertwining of conceptions of prevention, protection and contagion, the mobilisation of knowledges and practices that seek to respond to the threat of contagion and the anxiety of contamination. Both the possibilities of the emergence of complex "webs of power" and the conditions of marginalisation of traditional knowledges are thus revealed through an exercise of ethnographic fieldwork in exceptional conditions.
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