Lepcha medical culture in transition: ethnobotany, health and healing in Sikkim, India

On the 7th of November I will be arriving in Delhi, India, to begin fieldwork as part of my DPhil (PhD) in Social Anthropology. The current plan is to initially travel up to Sikkim and stay in Gangtok for two months. The initial focus of my project will be to take intensive Nepali lessons, in Sikkim, Kalimpong and possibly in Nepal itself for three or four months. This will be combined with "contact-building" and basic familiarisation with the general area and tentative plan-making for specific fieldsite locations. The longer-term plan is to carry out around 18 months of comparative research in at least two sites in Sikkim and possibly one further one in East Nepal.

My research interests focus on ecological and medical anthropology and the relationship between economic and cultural changes - in particular how changes in livelihood affect the knowledge (linguistic/recognition & application skills) and use (practical-situationa l) of "traditional knowledge", with particular focus on traditional medical knowledge. My Probationary Research Paper (PRS) is available here. This is a summary the research project as described in the paper:

This research project will focus on how and why traditional medical knowledge is changing among the Lepcha of the Himalayan state of Sikkim in North India. It will focus in particular on both their ethnobotanical knowledge and use of medicinal plants, and their conceptions and perceptions of health and health-systems. There are three aims: firstly, by studying two particular domains of Lepcha medical culture - plant knowledge and conceptions of health - to show how practical knowledge and perceptions are intertwined; secondly, by carrying out a comparative study in two villages, an urban-based one and another more rural community, this study will attempt to determine to what extent medical knowledge is in transition, transformation and change. Finally, the reasons for these changes, if any, will be considered by linking broader social, political and economic changes with local experiences. By integrating ethnobotany with medical anthropology, this research hopes to contribute to a scarcity of studies among the Lepchas. The comparative framework will provide insight into how knowledge changes, why it changes and how people experience these changes through something crucial to their everyday experience: their health and their knowledge of healing.

Methodologically I am interested in combining "classical" anthropology methods (long-term participant observation, in-depth semi/un-structured interviews, linguistic analysis, etc.., with methods developed and recently used considerably in ethnoecology-focussed anthropology. Fundamentally my interest is in integrating ethnobiological methods that have examined what counts as "knowledge" and tested methods for best measuring it, with an historically-influenced, contextual, descriptive-literary-ethnographic study of how one particular group (the Lepcha), is - very broadly (and simplistically) speaking - experiencing change.

In a giant-brushstroke-summary-generalisation, my research project is stimulated by an interest in:

1) Health and what it means to be "well" (e.g. the importance of livelihood - investigating the impact of subsistence vs. cash-cropping on self-perceived well-being);
2) Healing and methods developed to maintain/improve/change health (e.g. medicinal plant knowledge, ritual-healing practices);
3) The transmission/transformation/creation/practice-and-performance of "Traditional Knowledge", particularly related to medicinal plants (as this links with 1 and 2, and particularly as explored in the ethnobotanical/biological literature so far).
4) The dynamics (form and effect) of cultural and economic "change" and how they affect/relate-to each other (e.g. is there such a thing as a "transition" from locally-derived traditional medicinal plant use to internationally-developed biomedical-use and how does this influence people's knowledge and use of "traditional knowledge").
5) Methodology as a systematic (or somewhat unsystematic as fieldwork inevitably starts off as) procedure for creating, organising and analysing anthropological observations. Generally my interest is in combining qualitative and quantitative methods and enlarging, as much as an anthropologist can, the domain that is traditionally thought of as "anthropology" by referring to, in discussions and analyses, to the broader disciplinary domain of the social sciences.