The Magic of the Subtle Realms
Landing in Nepal makes me think of my early years in anthropology. Anthropologists had just started to look at illness as a cultural event. We had just discovered that illness is seen, expressed and experienced differently in each culture. That bodies are subjected to culture-specific anatomies and that becoming sick happens within the classificatory system of the cultural mind and not in the organs. We were fascinated. Anthropology has discovered new land: the body! The bodyscape.
A friend of mine, a young medical doctor back then, applied for a research grant, which he received, set out for Nepal in order to study exactly this: the culture-specific illness classification of a non-western society in the foothills of the Himalayas. He moved in with the Tamangs of Cautara in Eastern Nepal, a people of Tibetan descent. He stayed for a whole year. And here is what he found.
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