Asian Medical Industries: Contemporary Perspectives on Traditional Pharmaceuticals

This book develops the concept of Asian Medical Industries as a novel perspective on traditional Asian medicines.

Complementing and updating existing work in this field, the book provides a critical and comparative analytic framework for understanding Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, Sowa Rigpa, and Japanese Kampo in the 21st century. No longer subaltern health resources or conservative systems of traditional knowledge, these medicines have become an integral part of modern Asia as innovative, lucrative industries. Ten original case studies employ insights from anthropology, history, geography, pharmaceutical sciences, botany, and economics to trace the transformation of Asian medical traditions into rapidly growing and dynamic pharmaceutical industries. Collectively, these contributions identify this as a major phenomenon impacting Asian and global healthcare, economics, cultural politics, and environments. The book suggests that we can learn more about Asian medicines today by approaching them as industries rather than as cultural or epistemic systems.

Asian Medical Industries is a highly original resource for students and scholars across a range of academic fields such as anthropology, history, and Asian studies, as well as medical practitioners, health sector actors, and policymakers.

Stephan Kloos is Acting Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research on the development of Sowa Rigpa has been published in numerous articles and the co-edited volume Healing at the Periphery: Ethnographies of Tibetan Medicine in India (Pordié & Kloos).

Calum Blaikie is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Focusing on pharmaceutical, institutional, and economic dimensions of Sowa Rigpa in the Himalayas, his research has been published in numerous leading academic journals and edited volumes.