The Work of Care in Russia speaker series is hosting an online book discussion of Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia (Fordham University Press, 2021) with the author Tatiana Chudakova, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University. This discussion will be Moderated by Svetlana Borodina (Harriman Institute). The RSW is a co-sponsor of this series presented by the Columbia University Harriman Institute.
Traditional medicine enjoys widespread appeal in today’s Russia, an appeal that has often been framed either as a holdover from pre-Soviet times or as the symptom of capitalist growing pains and vanishing Soviet modes of life. Mixing Medicines seeks to reconsider these logics of emptiness and replenishment. Set in Buryatia, a semi-autonomous indigenous republic in Southeastern Siberia, the book offers an ethnography of the institutionalization of Tibetan medicine, a botanically-based therapeutic practice framed as at once foreign, international, and local to Russia’s Buddhist regions.
For more information and to register: https://harriman.columbia.edu/event/work-of-care-tatiana-chudakova/