TATIANA CHUDAKOVA, 2021, Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia, New York: Fordham University Press, 333 pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-9431-2 

KEYWORDS: Medicine, Russia, Buddhism, History of Science, Production of Knowledge

In today’s globalized world, it is common for individual patients and broader communities to seek health advice and intervention across multiple medical traditions, often combining biomedical approaches with others dubbed “traditional,” “complementary,” or “alternative.” In Tatiana Chudakova’s Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia the author deftly historicizes and analytically engages a captivating landscape of medical pluralism in Buryatia, one of three “ethnically Buddhist” regions in Russia. Central to the volume is a critique of the manner in which anthropologists often assumes that patients are driven away from biomedicine either by way of the failures of “official” medicine fostering desperation and medical omnivory, or via a pursuit of self liberation and economic subjecthood through the embrace of “unofficial” alternatives. Chudakova’s analysis suggests that these assumptions of a “centrifugal force” fail on two levels – first by assuming a biomedical center, and second because outward spinning inherently results in separation. Conversely, Tibetan medicine (Sowa Rigpa) and “modern” medicine are deeply intertwined in Siberia, “mixed” and cohabitating, even if they fail to achieve state-sponsored integration. And those entrusting Tibetan medical practitioners (emchi) are not just moving away from a biomedical center, but moving toward new projects of self-making in the post-socialist state. 

In six dense chapters, Chudakova demonstrates the complex, politically ensnared, and continually evolving place of Tibetan medicine in ideological projects of nation-making, economic commercialization, and identity. Centered on encounters with practitioners, patients, and administrators at the “East-West Medicine Center” – a state institution that explicitly aims to offer rehabilitative medicine that combines “Eastern” and “Western” healing traditions – the research additionally includes observations from professional research conferences, a university research laboratory, and adjacent medical and religious spaces.

Chapter one makes clear the always-already hybrid and contested nature of Tibetan medicine in Siberia, where Buddhism arrived around the same time as the region’s incorporation into the Russian Empire. In subsequent centuries, competing epistemologies of religion and science emerged in the translations of central medical texts, and secular national consciousness pushed the Buddhist underpinnings of Tibetan medicine underground and aligned its therapeutics with biomedicine. The messiness of making and remaking of Tibetan medicine as medicine is illustrated in Chapter two through the case study of the “pulsometer” – a scientifically engineered machine meant to mimic and objectivize the use of pulse (or, pulses) for diagnostic purposes beyond the cardiovascular system. Rooted in the broader socialist project to discover the bioelectric thermal radiation underpinning extrasensory perception, the pulsometer centered on reverse engineering emchi perception through mechanization and imaging. But the continued reliance on emchi for not only calibration but interpretation of results, in the end, created a c