Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia

[00:00:10]Well let's just get started with our conversation.  So I'm just going to say some introductory remarks and welcome everyone. I think people will  continue to trickle in a little bit. But for those who don't know, my name is Frances  Garrett and I teach Buddhism and Tibetan Studies at the University of Toronto and I'm really  happy to introduce today the first event in our series on New Books in Buddhism and Healing.  Our featured guest today is Dr. Tatiana Chudakova, who's assistant professor... associate professor?  assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and she's also the  co-director of Science, Technology, and Society, a program there. Dr. Chudakova has a PhD in  cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago and she works in the areas of medical  anthropology, science and technology, ethnicity and indigeneity, nationalism, post-socialism,  with a geographic focus on Russia and North Asia.

[00:01:08]So today we're going to talk about  her recent book published in 2021 by Fordham University Press which is  called "Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia". Let's see if I  can find my camera... right here... that's it.

[00:01:25]So I really love this book, it's an ethnographic  account of traditional medicine in Russia that focuses in particular on the practice of Tibetan  medicine in Buryatia which is a semi-autonomous indigenous republic in southeastern Siberia  that's had a long and really fascinating connection to Buddhism and Tibetan medicine.  So just briefly, this series is sponsored by the University of Toronto's Buddhism, Psychology,  and Mental Health program, and it's co-sponsored by the Robert H.N Ho Family Foundation Center  for Buddhist Studies here. This series is also associated with a graduate level course that I'm  teaching this semester on Buddhism and healing, so we're doing this in a zoom webinar format  and you can only see the two of us here but the students in the course are here and we're going  to go through some of the questions that they have shared for Dr. Chudakova. So this event is being  recorded and it'll be made available online soon, and if you're okay with that Dr. Chudakova, I  think we'll just get started with some questions from the students. Of course, thank you so much  for your generous introduction and I really thank you all for engaging with my work and I look  forward to doing my best to answer your questions.

[00:02:38]Great, so I thought we'd start with a topic  addressed by two students, both Yuvina and Erica who have asked you to say a little bit more  about how traditional Buddhist medicine or Tibetan medicine has been integrated into Russian  culture beyond Buryatia and this could serve, I think, as an introduction. It's a kind of  a tricky one to answer in an elevator pitch, so it's kind of like the answer is a long one and  part of what the book strives to do. But in brief, I think there are sort of different Tibetan  medicines within Russia that have very little to do with each other, have very  minimal conversation with each other, and it's easy to kind of mistake one for  the other because from a certain angle it can all look quite isomorphic. Tibetan medicine is  Tibetan medicine is Tibetan medicine sort of deal, but of course that's not quite the  case. So whereas in Buryatia and other kind of "traditionally", although I use that  word in cautious brackets, traditionally Buddhist regions like Kalmykia and Tuva, etc. and to some  extent Altai, I think... although shamanism is stronger there. Tibetan medicine has entered  the kind of regional or local or armamentarium, therapeutic armamentarium pretty much around  the same time as Buddhism entered the religious landscape. In other places, and especially in  sort of the metropolitan places, that appearance is linked to other... The appearance of  Tibetan medicine, especially its appearance in the public imaginary, is linked to other  processes, but they are not entirely divorced from each other either. So in the book there's a story  of Pyotr Badmayev who arguably opened the first Tibetan medicine pharmacy in kind of Europe,  that part of Eurasia, his pharmacy was in Saint Petersburg and then his practice was developed and  continued by his nephew. That was until the Soviet government came into power, it had a very rocky  relationship, and I'm happy to go into that with non-biomedical traditions that in any  way invoked either religious or non-modern therapeutic forms, and we can talk about why that  is, how that logic operates. But he had a very rocky relationship with the Soviet government  and arguably had a very rocky relationship with sort of both a medical profession before,  during the Imperial Russia period, had a very rocky relationship with both the medical  profession and with various state officials, and was very much a political person who was trying  to advocate for his land rights, essentially.

[00:06:22]But that form, that kind of strand of Tibetan  medicine or Buddhist medicine more broadly was in conversation with say biomedicine and European  medicine much more openly and from the very start, and antagonistically. Whereas in places like  Buryatia you had a kind of classic case, and you still do to some extent, a classic case,  although that has changed of course, a classic case of a kind of plural therapeutic landscape  where people went to different practitioners depending on needs and also depending on what was  available and et cetera. There's another kind of part of the story, and I'm simplifying this  a lot, but there's another part of the story that I think resonates with the ways in which  non-biomedical therapies are taken up in various Euro-American contexts, which is a kind of like  the oppositional story, the biomedical modernity and its discontents kind of story, whereby people  are looking for alternatives because it gives them a way to articulate, not just sort of remedy the  problems that they might encounter with their concrete medical systems, but also articulate  certain things that cannot be articulated otherwise, or whereby this medicine is a place,  or healing offers a terrain for articulating other kinds of stakes and politics and critiques.  To some extent I think that is the case as well, and very much was the case in the 1990s where  people were turning in Russia to all kinds of alternative... again, I use the term alternative  with a lot of reticence because I think it sort of sets up a binary that I think, at least in  medical anthropology, a lot of people really try to deconstruct because it creates biomedicine or  presents biomedicine as a kind of un-interrogated default. So part of the project of the book  probably is that we can't tell the story, we can't tell the story of alternative therapy as a  mode of resistance or as a mode of flight, kind of what I've sort of talked about when I talk about  this centrifugal model, but I think it doesn't tell us the whole story and I think it's such  a seductive model, it can sort of obscure other more fine-grained and arguably more interesting  ways of reading it. So I guess sort of going back to the question, there are kind of multiple  paths through which Tibetan medicine ended up in Russia and it signifies different things for  quite different people. So it sort of depends on like which one we're talking about. But of course  they're all interconnected too because people are, in a way, both locally and globally, so they're  always already in conversation and sort of looking at each other and trying to evaluate  each other based on various kinds of metrics, and those metrics can be quite different as well.  That's so interesting, that brings up a lot of themes that are like central to your book, one of  which is that center and periphery kind of model where you're trying to like destabilize our sort  of uncritical sense of what is at the center and these other so-called alternative practices are at  the margins. So I love how you did that and say... I think you call your methodology then like  "attending to the periphery"? The peripheral vision kind of, yeah. Yeah, I think I got this  feeling when we were just chatting about kind of the realm of Tibetan medicine, but part of  where I got this feeling is from this frustration with the sense that outside of Buryatia where  Tibetan medicine is quite routine in many ways, I mean it's not entirely routine in the state,  there is a long history of this state's medical kind of asymptotic or aspirational modernization,  and again I use that term as an emic term, what people say about where the medical system  ought to go and what that might look like.

[00:11:08]But I'm not making any claims whatsoever that  biomedicine is modern and this is all kind of ideological narratives, but people do use these  terms. But I think that the center-periphery stuff and where the methodology comes from is from this  frustration that it's invisible unless you look at it in a certain way, and it's invisible  at multiple scales, whereas you encounter patients who have been using it for years,  you have people who devote their lives to it, to very kind of difficult and often legally  tricky and often emotionally difficult practice, but as that practice scales up it  becomes erased, and it becomes erased in academic circles in a certain way where it's  like "well it's not real Tibetan medicine", "It's not real Buddhism" etc, you probably hear  these kinds of narratives. Then it also of course in Russia itself it becomes sort of erased at  different levels until it's useful to somebody. So part of that kind of idea if we look for it in  a certain way without parachuting certain kinds of categories onto it then suddenly you can  see that it's kind of everywhere. That's so interesting and also reminds me of another kind of  key point that really kind of inspired me, which is when you said that in medical anthropology or  anthropology often we pay attention to like flows and continuities but you were also then looking at  how hard it is actually to keep something fixed, and so to think of that, to look at the work  involved in fixing a tradition is also important.

[00:13:10]Yeah, and maybe that can segue into a few of  the questions that I saw that you sent me from the students, but I think there's been kind of, at  least in anthropology, there's been kind of these two models for thinking about non-biomedical  therapies' relationship to the state, and one model which has some really  beautiful ethnographies written about it, I'm thinking of Mei Zhan's work on  traditional Chinese medicine, and sort of Volker Scheid's work also on TCM, Judy Farquhar, so it's this kind of really sophisticated way  of showing how, for example in this case of TCM, where traditional Chinese medicine becomes at one  point mid 20th century a kind of national project and it's a national project that's like very  carefully kind of choreographed and therefore the tradition isn't textualized it's sort of  enshrined in all kinds of ways. Then I think one of the questions I saw was drawing a parallel  to India, between Russia and India and that's the other... well you also have the model of  sort of biomedicine and it's satellites, that like alternative therapy satellites, but that's  not necessarily the case here. Then the other model where you have a kind of nation state that  can't claim a single tradition because of its own internal kind of structure. This is where Russia  and India kind of are very similar. A really wonderful word by a historian of medicine, science  and technology and medicine, Projit Mukharji, coins the term "subaltern therapeutics" to  think about this relationship between the state, his work is in India, between the state and  those therapeutic practices that aren't exactly enshrined, like they're kind of  incorporated in some ways but they're not enshrined as the like official  national medicine, traditional medicine, or national medical tradition, and so what might  be then their relationship to this? It's sort of a similar, obviously very different kind of  context still, but you see some of the echoes, I think, with what's happening in Russia as well  with specifically that. So people that I was working with were very very savvy and very aware  of this and there was a lot of jokes going on of going, like "look Mongolia has managed  to..." I mean it's really Tibetan medicine, it's not national Mongolian medicine, we all  know it's Tibetan medicine, "but they did such a great job at nationalizing it... why can't we  do it?" and there's a lot of kind of laughter around it because everybody knows why they can't  do it. Huh, yeah that question was from Sumeet, I think, and so we could move to a little bit  more of his questions, he was also asking about whether you could say a bit about what  impact traditional medicine so-called has had on biomedicine. Sometimes we think of  the other direction, but what about the impact on biomedicine that these other forms of healing  might have? I think this is another one of those there's no short answer, and a lot of those,  at least a lot of what I try to do in the book is exactly kind of speak to that question, so  there's a couple of chapters if you're interested, probably a kind of case by case, a very science  studies sort of chapter is the false diagnostics chapter and the relationship between sort of these  physicists trying to nail down what it is that's happening with Tibetan pulse palpation  and to try to mechanize it in some ways, and of course there's an interesting kind of  background to this of the sort of charisma of the machine and the charisma of imaging and the  possibility of creating images that can circulate as opposed to this very situated practice of  diagnosis that amchi is engaged in normally. But yeah I think the impact is interesting, I would  be curious, and this is changing in North America, but I think a good place to start answering  that question and maybe this is also where the parallel was, a lot of places that are not North  America are helpful... I mean at least in Russia, biomedicine as we understand, first of all I  think there's really an argument to be made that biomedicine is not universal, there's many  multiple incarnations of biomedicine and so this umbrella term under which we kind of lump a  certain set of practices at greater granularity ends up looking really weirdly different  depending on where you land. So that's kind of one element of it. So it's really the  ideology of biomedicine that we're looking at.

[00:18:29]Right, and then we can ask  so what is it that we mean?

[00:18:33]I got constantly challenged by  my interlocutors in the field when I invoked biomedicine and they would sort  of get... some just kind of laughed at me, others just kind of like really challenged. So  I think I have some of this in the book where a lot of what we ended up doing is kind of trying  to come to terms with are we actually speaking about the same thing, and what can we assume  as universals to constitute this contrasted set of biomedicine to something else? I think that  question is incredibly productive and something that I learned from my informants rather than the  other way around. That's interesting because we think of that as a science studies question, but  your informants were also grappling with it. Oh yeah, totally. They were totally on board  not only in word but sort of articulating it in ways that I think sometimes science studies  doesn't quite land. It's all very abstract.

[00:19:34]But they were very sophisticated about  this. But I think the impact... I think one of the big differences with Russia  is that biomedicine does not really have a monopoly on people's therapeutic imaginaries in  the way that it certainly I think does... I don't know about Canada, maybe Canada is a little bit  more inclusive or whatever you want to call or experimental whatever it is in its relation,  but certainly in the United States I think the sense of monopoly, biomedical monopoly,  which is to say it's permeation not just through sort of the kind of infrastructure,  medical infrastructure and its economic kind of weave, as it were, but also people's kind  of imaginaries, like common imaginaries. That grip is much more powerful, and partly there's  historical reasons for it. I think partly because Soviet medicine was constructing itself as an  opponent alternative to "fill in the blank", kind of like counter current to imperialist bourgeois  medicine. So it was, at times, extremely dogmatic, but at times really trying to formulate other  kinds of ideologies. So as a result of that, as a result of other processes too, it was quite  willing to incorporate, for example, acupuncture, really absolutely rebranding it, rebranding it  in the terms of neurology to make it kind of palatable, but nonetheless claiming it for  itself without too many problems with like epistemic friction there. Yeah, so I think there  are and there's a lot of these instances with specifically Soviet biomedicine and then sort  of its inheritor. Yeah, aren't they really kind of leaders in the scientific study of energy  fields? Like your pulse analysis chapter is an example of that but I had the impression  that that was also quite of interest... It was, and it was interesting... I don't know  if you've read, there's a really amazing book by Alaina lemon called... oh my god I can't...  It's her most recent book. Anyway, if you're interested in like energy field research both this  particular period on energy field research in the Soviet Union and kind of in a mirror image by the  CIA, she writes about the extra sensory sort of research done. It's a great science studies book,  it's also really good linguistic anthropology.

[00:22:41]Like if you're interested I really highly  recommend it. It's a really fun read too.

[00:22:46]But again, I'm happy to share those  book references if anybody's interested.

[00:22:52]The energy stuff was very popular and a lot of  people were involved in it around sort of starting with the late 70s but mostly throughout the 80s.  The interesting thing about it is that it was less on the clinic side of things and  much more on the physics side of the kind of science and medicine spectrum. We can  talk about the role of physicists and sort of the incredible social prestige of physicists that  allowed all kinds of projects to be undertaken.

[00:23:39]But yeah, no there was quite a bit of  research. Part of that same period connects to a lot of kind of weird experimental research  around nuclear impacts on the human body or radiation impacts on the human body, and part  of it also connects to space medicine. So the idea or this question of our organisms in extreme  conditions preoccupied quite a few clusters of the medical profession right around that same time. So  you can sort of see the strands of these different preoccupations weaving together and kind of  skirting around or glancing or speaking to things like Tibetan medicine in this kind of like  weird relationship of appropriational translation, I guess. Yeah, I'm not sure if in anyone's  else's mind that would be a good segue to this next question, but in my mind it sounds related,  because one of the really exciting contributions that your book makes I think is in your emphasis  on what you call the "densely collective mingling of human and non-human worlds" so I was thinking  of outer space, that was my connection. So you say a therapeutic experience involves not only doctors  and patients but also machines, botanicals, minerals, texts, and non-human others. So one of  our students, Thinley, asked if you could tell us a little bit more about what brought you to  that interest and how you came to observe that?

[00:25:19]So why the multi-species orientation or more other  than human orientation... Yeah, I think I came to later answer your question kind of more  ethnographically. I came at it through the plants because one of the first things I  was really struck by, and this was way back when in 2006 when I was sort of a  fledgling grad student and first went to Buryatia in a kind of research capacity and started  interfacing with the practitioners, amchi practitioners of Tibetan medicine there, I  was struck by how much plants and specifically like the labor of making medicines was at the  center of both their ethical stance, their professional identity, the ways through which they  distinguished themselves from other practitioners, the ways in which patients distinguish Tibetan  medicine from pretty much everything else, including Russian herbalism which I was really  surprised by because to me very early on right the two seemed to be in conversation. So  this primacy of plants which then became the Tibetan sort of medicine cannon in the Materia  Medica it's very clear it's not just plants, it's many, many, many things. But this sort  of specificity of Buryatia is that some of the complicated ingredients, let's put it  this way, including animal derived ingredients, some mineral derived ingredients that are  difficult to obtain have been substituted by local plants and that's kind of what my  informants, especially in the sort of religious side of things, because of course it's not a  purely religious practice... I mean it is of course but you know what I mean, it straddles  that divide between lay and temple based. They were really emphasizing this idea that  yes Buryat lamas did not make their own like theoretical interventions into the Tibetan  medicine cannon like some Mongolian lamas did, although there's enormous translational work  so that really depends on how you estimate translation and whether you think of translation  as theory, which I think it is. But they were very much focused on creating a compendium of  substitutions for various sorts of ingredients.

[00:28:30]So this this stuff on kind of this relationship  with plants and I can go on about that for a long time because I really like that side of it, but  that relationship with kind of botanical beings and an accounting for the interests of botanical  beings relative to right the practice of making medicines and sort of for the benefit of etc.,  was very much at the center of everybody's sort of ethics who was seriously in this, and in fact the  hinge across which or the boundary across which a lot of people distinguished ethical real Tibetan  medicine from sort of the fakes, the knock-offs, the kind of unscrupulous practitioners, so that  was really my entry point, and then I sort of started with the plants with sort of just the  pragmatics of like how do you get this ingredient if you need that ingredient for the specific  formulas and formulas cannot really be modified unless the substitution is sort of approved,  like recognized as valid in some way.

[00:29:40]How do you get the ingredients needed for this  formula in a situation of dearth, and that dearth has many reasons, and after that it mushroomed.  That was the kind of point of entry and then that mushroomed into a whole kind of expansive  non-human world of relations between people and all sorts of other stuff which made health  and therapy and healing etc. far more complicated than this sort of classic dyad of the  doctor-patient encounter. Yeah for sure, and does that bring you then also to the healing role  of certain deities or spirits? Land spirits or of ritual practice of other kinds?

[00:30:33]Yes I think that is a really interesting and again  complicated question because in many ways the practitioner, at least the amchi that I worked  with, everybody's practicing this sort of like... I don't know what to call it exactly, kind of  routine Buddhism, like it's not something that one calls necessarily attention to all that much.  But most of the time the ways in which sort of health and healing and disease, illnesses, were  talked about or explained within that domain was very much in these logic of "nyepa", like the culprits, or humors, sometimes  it's translated as humors. We don't like that term but some people listening might  understand. Yes exactly, the humors or what in Russian gets translated from Tibetan as  culprits or "vinovniki". But the humoral logic and that's also the side that's been  popularized in the sort of pop-y version of Tibetan medicine in Russia because people like  to identify "I'm a this" and there's lots of sort of debates about how epistemically valid  that is but lots of people like to identify as "I'm a wind" so they hang that little identity  card on themselves and get excited about this. But nonetheless because a lot of the time, and I'm  sure that's not a surprise, the stuff that's being dealt with through Tibetan medicine is usually  chronic illness that might come with a biomedical diagnosis and the patient will bring their  biomedical diagnosis into the kind of encounter with the amchi and the amchi's might look at it,  might not, and say "yeah that's just the surface manifestation. We need to get to the root cause",  but then the rest is sort of managed within that kind of lexus. However, there are definitely cases  where the amchi might say "look, that's beyond my purview". So there's kind of a fairly  strict division between a kind of medical therapeutic domain and the kind of work of spirits  or land entities, or what gets translated in Russian as land owners, or gods, or other deities,  or karma, or ancestors, and this also slides into sort of Buryat shamanism. So people's  trajectories, they pass through the amchi and they might settle there if it's working, if  it's helping them, or they can move. They might move on, the amchi might say "in addition to this  you might need something else" and so they kind of keep going, it's a stop and go itinerary,  I guess. For some that's their destination, and for many it isn't. It doesn't stop there.  I loved how you played with that metaphor just starting out the book even, with the bus  ride to the end of the line and then you kind of complicated that very quickly. That was  very nice, very skillfully written. Oh, thanks.

[00:34:30]So Jonathan asks whether you'd be willing to share  a bit about how you approach your own healthcare and he's wondering about in particular  how your research work might relate to your subjective experience? Partly I think for  him this is a question grounded in indigenous research methodologies and how you're positioning  yourself as a researcher. Yeah for sure. So I am Russian, I am not from that region, so just  in terms of my own positionality... although I purportedly have family from  there but it's lost to time.

[00:35:06]When I went in... yeah, I don't mind answering  the question. When I went in I was absolutely sort of open. I was sort of look, I don't  know what the medical system here is, but I was open to using it for  my own sort of problems etc. Interestingly enough sort of my first encounter  with the amchi they very quickly could tell me what it is that was wrong with me and there's  a beautiful kind of discursive practice around it because they can nail like the symptoms  to the T, and then you have this beautiful explanation. I had terrible, terrible insomnia  at the time and so I was kind of like I'll try anything if I can sleep more than three hours a  night. So yeah that was a kind of life changer for me but it was also not in any way...  and maybe this is very much a difference for different patients, and I've heard different  patients articulate this in different ways, but it is not a big deal in a way that I think  there's a more complicated relationship to indigenous medicine here in North America for very  good reasons, because of a very kind of different history, which isn't just to dismiss Russia's  own sort of settler-colonial ambitions, but that history is quite different, including the  sort of period of the Soviet kind of complicated, and very messed up in many ways, promotion of  "orchestrated diversity" as it were, which is to say that soviet ideology believed of course a  post- imperialism, but at the same believed that national identities would eventually disappear,  be subsumed into class antagonism, and so it's okay to kind of leave them for now as long as  everybody's sort of recognizably standardized... different in standardized ways, and that  really did impact my informants because that meant that there's a kind of imposition from  the top of what it means to be this or that, and that has an impact for medicine. So that's  kind of the genesis story, but the book end of that story or the other sort of side of that story  is that as I got more and more involved or kind of sucked into understanding what underpins that  practice, which is to say that relationship to local environments and local ecologies which are  constantly predated by various sorts of forces, and most of those forces from the outside, from  outside that region, my kind of originally very naïve sense that "oh my god this  is amazing" really gave way to a sense... and this is something that my  informants were articulating and I was a little thick-headed at first because I didn't hear  it, but I hope I did eventually. There's simply not enough, there's simply not enough resources to  make these medicines at mass scale, whatever other kind of claims might be made. There's not  enough to heal everybody and so then it really becomes a question... there's also kind  of really weird extractive relationships with European pharmaceutical companies, currently  with China that some of my colleagues still working on this topic are noting that  there's a lot of just poaching off various... and this was going on at the time when I was  doing research too but it has accelerated, of poaching off all kinds of both  botanical and animal resources happening across the border, the border's right there.  There's just not enough and so if this cannot be made at mass scale, and should not be made at mass  scale, then it really does become a question of what are the ethics of sort of promoting or  making visible. Oh yeah, that's interesting.

[00:40:12]So I have one last question and then maybe  we'll ask our attendees if they'd like to speak a question or type something in the question or  the chat. So Carl was wondering whether you have some comparative ideas on how Buddhist medicine  or healing works in a North American context, and I think he's thinking about whether the  state's medical apparatus here might play a role in extracting practices like mindfulness from this  wider Buddhist ecology of identity and practice, and whether your experience in Russia just kind  of generally gives you some insights into this North American circumstance? I think  that's a super interesting question and I don't have a really great answer  for it I'm afraid, so prefacing with that.

[00:40:58]There's been a lot of wonderful anthropological  literature including in anthropology of Buddhism and I think just like Buddhist studies as well  about the perils of translation, and so what does it mean, as Carl was saying, like what does  it mean to extract something often out of context, leaning onto all kinds of isomorphisms that may  or may not signify the same sorts of things, and then you get kind of stuck  with this question of like, but what if it works? So it's kind of the  Stengersian, Isabel Stenger's question of like "what if it works for the wrong reasons?"  which I really love that piece, it's called "The Doctor and the Charlatan", it's a really  beautiful articulation of kind of the genesis of western biomedicine in a certain way, relative  to the figure of the charlatan. But I think one of the main differences that struck me and  that stuck with me is that it's very difficult to compare, and maybe this is not quite the  same in Canada, but at least with the US it's very difficult to compare a system that's  at least partially, and this has changed a lot in Russia and I'm happy to answer questions if  anybody's interested in the granularity of like the ways in which the healthcare system  is organized relative to its economy, but by and large it has a relatively robust non-profit  sector, or a non-profit branch, public health sort of branch which in the United States is not the  case. I think that has extremely far-reaching effects for any sort of effort at cultural  translation or religious translation, I use that again with brackets, with kind of like scare  quotes or pincers. Now it is entirely possible that eventually the Russian healthcare system  will become increasingly commercialized, commercial based, sort of driven by capital  to put it very simply. It hasn't happened yet, it's a bifurcated system, there's a private side  of it, private medicine side of it, and there's a public medicine side of it, and the public  medicine side, for all its flaws, is relatively robust and it's sort of logics are different from  the very get-go for why people go into medicine.

[00:43:52]To put it very crassly, you don't go  into medicine in Russia to make money.

[00:43:59]So from there I think that has a lot of ramifications for what doctor's imagine  it is they're doing. So again, those comparisons are difficult. I think where I could compare and I  think where maybe the book is trying to intervene, at least for us as like researchers,  social scientists looking at this, I think it's really important to pay attention  to why people get passionate about stuff, including medical professionals, why do they  pursue something that seems to be counter narrative, the counter current, whatever it might  be? So I think we do need a better analytic and this is where maybe Buddhism can help. We do  need a better analytic of professional passions because that helps understand why certain  translations can be done and how they can be done. Does that make sense? That was a very vague  way of saying... Yeah, that's so interesting.

[00:45:07]I've never thought of it. That's really  fascinating. I'm going to ask if anyone in our audience here, or any of our students wants  to follow up on anything or ask a question?

[00:45:23]I guess some you can raise your hand and I  can unmute you or even render you visible.

[00:45:39]Oh, let's see. I somehow can't  see the chat... oh there I see it.

[00:45:58]Well I have another question. I wanted to  go back to something that you said earlier which is you use the phrase "botanical beings", to refer to plants I guess, and I'm just  wondering where that phrase comes from or what you're thinking is. I kind of love it, it reminds  me a little bit of Natasha Myers' work on plants.

[00:46:23]I'm pretty sure I was reading Natasha Myers when  I was writing this chapter way back when. Yeah it really was me trying to do justice in a kind  of very compact... you only have 40000 words for a chapter or 20000 words or however  many words for a chapter, to do justice to the ways in which my interlocutors in Buryatia,  both who were involved on the medicine making side, and there's divisions between people who  gather, who collect ingredients, and people who make the medicines, and there's kind of all  different kinds of experts on plants right that come together and weave together in all sorts of  complicated ways, including kind of pharmacists who are on that side of things as opposed  to the pharmaceutical kind of side of stuff.

[00:47:23]I really wanted to kind of do justice to the ways  in which they were attending to these botanical lives which had very different rhythms, obviously  have totally different ontologies from human lives in a way that did not reduce them, plants  that is, to purely human interests, if that makes sense. So kind of highlighting, I  was also probably reading Michael Marder's work at the time, "Plant-Thinking" which is sort of  philosophy, it was gonna be in that environmental humanities vein, I think Natasha Myers might be  quoting him as well. But anyway, I was engaging with this literature right and really trying  to kind of put the two things in conversation, put in conversation this really dense and careful  attention to plants I was seeing on the one hand, and the sort of other side of it was like what  does it mean to flip the anthropological lens here or rather the anthropocentric lens here. What does  it mean to kind of privilege... not only privilege the relation but privilege that mutual... well at  least the humans acknowledgement of the plants as something other than a raw resource, because that  opens them up in a different way and therefore also impacts plant lives not just human lives.  Yeah I find that so interesting, and could you maybe expand on kind of other places that people  could learn more about this way of thinking, about plants? What comes to mind for me is  writing, like you've described, Natasha Myers, but in sort of how would you call that sort of  environmental studies? Environmental humanities, and then I'm also thinking of indigenous studies  like Robin Wall Kimmerer... Yes, yes yes!

[00:49:36]"Braiding Sweet Grass", absolutely. That's very  foundational to this. I actually teach that book and that one is like such a good starting point.  I think it should be on every syllabus. But yeah, definitely environmental  humanities... sorry I'm losing my mic, sorry for the really loud noise there. I think  Natasha Myers definitely is wonderful on this.

[00:50:07]There's an anthropologist, Stacy Langwick's work  is really, really... so I know the anthropology of that kind of thinking, Stacy Langwick's work,  Julia Charlebois' work, I think she's also somewhere in Canada, Toronto maybe as well,  no? Maybe McGill, not sure, but also on kind of plant-human relations. The interesting thing  about it I think is that there has been such a wonderfully rich literature on multi-species  stuff in and for both anthropology and STS but that focuses on animals. I mean it's so  beautiful and rich and like expansive and then us plant people are... Yeah right, or it's maybe  indigenous studies and like even global indigenous studies too, like if you think of plant medicines  in all different parts of the world like this is where plants have a real agency and humans kind  of come second even in the medical tradition or the healing tradition where that sort of plant is  used, and so those are like really good examples of that type of work. Yeah absolutely, and I'm  really hoping that we'll see more of it, again, the side that I'm more familiar with is  the kind of multi-species anthro-plant correction side of things or correcting towards  more plant side, but I think there's definitely other literatures as well. So Braiding Sweet  Grass comes to mind. Studying indigenous medicine like even Siberian medicine or Tibetan medicine  too, Amazonian medicine, like the plant healing focus is so interesting and I know there's several  students in my class who have an interest in that.

[00:51:58]For sure. I think it's also really interesting,  I don't know at least this is what I worry about a lot, is how that gets... There's really  fascinating literature on the kind of tourism around ayahuasca in the Amazon and the kind of  like co-optation of ayahuasca into all kinds of sort of western appetites as it were, which what I  appreciate about that literature is that it raises the question of to what extent does the kind of  moral imperative of healing provide enough of a justification for circulation, but broadly? Of  human healing you mean, at the expense of the plants. Yes, at the expense of the plants and at  the expense of other humans. Like whose bodies are allowed to be healed or can be healed because  a lot of the time, not always, but a lot of the time it is a question of limited, if not scarce,  then limited potentials, limited resources. Yes, I know Sienna Craig whose book we're reading coming  up in our class also has talked a lot about some of these issues, especially the issue of efficacy  which we didn't get to but that's very powerful in your book, but then also this plant scarcity topic  which is a very big concern in Himalayan regions.

[00:53:32]Yes exactly, and Sienna Craig's book is wonderful  and I'm excited that you're reading it. I'm also in conversation with that book. Yeah, great. Well  I feel like we should start wrapping up and if you don't mind my asking one final question I'd love  to know what you are working on going forward, and what kind of interests like where this is going?  Yeah for sure I would love to answer and thank you so much all of you for these wonderful, wonderful  questions. I had a really wonderful time talking to you all although so sorry I can't see you.  I, like everybody else in this room and probably yourself, I was sidelined, my projects were  completely kind of like sidelined by the pandemic.

[00:54:22]It is quite difficult for me to travel back. I  would like to eventually go back to both Russia, I haven't been in a few years. Since the epidemic  started haven't been back. But my current project which kind of allows me the luxury, at least the  way that it is formulated, allows me some of the luxury of not having to leave my my office or  leave it virtually only, but I'm working on the concept of self-experimentality, and nd that's  a very STS-y sort of focus, a very STS-y kind of question, but I'm looking at the ways in which  different groups or communities are formed around pharmaceutical and other kinds of  experimentations. So it's kind of a continuation of what I was concerned with in the first book  but it's also sort of going into it, and just to give you a quick example one side of it or one  chapter of the book is about cognitive enhancement drugs and their circulation. So a study of the  biohacking community is what you're doing? Yes.

[00:55:43]Oh, interesting. Yeah that's kind of one part  of that story, I'm also writing a chapter on the sort of the polio vaccine history, the sort  of Soviet- US connection around polio vaccines, so it has this kind of multi-sided stuff  but yes biohacking is one example of what I'm currently interested in. Great can you  give me one or two other examples, I'm so curious.

[00:56:09]Yes well one of them also involves the use of  the lions mane mushroom if you what that is? Yes, I'm a user of all these things. Well there you  go! But it has sort of interesting contested uses both sort of in terms of its circulation and like  what it has been translated what is it supposed to do to put it very simply, and how does it work as  a sort of single ingredient versus when it is part of formulas, like multi-ingredient formulas which  is a question we can spend hours on because it's really complicated, it gets really complicated.  I'm also interested in the growers side, so who and what and where and why are they growing  this and for what sorts of markets and how are they putting it in circulation. So that's another  thing. Wow, fantastic. Well thank you so much!

[00:57:14]Yeah, I think we should wrap up because it's  time and so thank you for being here with us and for your answers and for writing that book.  That was an amazing book, I was so pleased to read it and I can't wait for that next one. I'm very  eager to learn more about that. Thank you so much, and thank you so much for inviting me. It  was really a pleasure to talk to you all.

[00:57:38]Okay thanks. Bye. Bye, see you soon I  hope. Have a good rest of your day. Bye