What Counts as a ‘Text’? Narrative, Authority, and Knowledge Transmission in Sowa Rigpa Encounters

Presenters:

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Abstract

What constitutes an important or valid text in contemporary Sowa Rigpa praxis? How do different actors value, understand and apply various textual sources? These questions emerged as pertinent during a pharmacy-focused Sowa Rigpa workshop held in Kathmandu in 2011, involving 40 practitioners from China, India and Nepal, as well as four anthropologists from Europe and the USA. This paper examines how documents ranging from the classical medical corpus, pharmacological and ritual texts to workshop programmes, academic articles, plant databases, and government certificates were produced, debated and deployed in and around this event. It reflects on the ways such texts facilitated meaningful interactions – translation, knowledge transmission, epistemological tensions – during this collaborative and cross-cultural process. The specifics of this workshop illustrate broader dynamics about the social production and reproduction of medical and cultural authority in relation to Sowa Rigpa – among practitioners of Sowa Rigpa themselves and between these practitioners and practitioners of anthropology and philology. Through an analysis of the different forms of text that were in circulation at this workshop, as well as how these texts came to life through embodied actions (participating in rituals, visiting herb markets, making medicines together) the paper argues that practitioners and scholars are increasingly interacting with and through a widening range of textual genres. These interactions, in turn, contribute to the coproduction of Sowa Rigpa both as a field of knowledge-practice and as a field of academic representation.