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TITLE: Competing Medical Cultures or Close Collaborators? Islamic Medicine and Biomedicine in South Asia and the Middle East
SPEAKER: Kelly Pemberton
EVENT DATE: 06/17/2009
RUNNING TIME: 65 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
In this lecture, Kelly Pemberton discusses ways in which the relationship between various streams of knowledge and praxis surrounding Islamic tibb (medicine) in contemporary South Asia and the Middle East may be articulated. Drawing upon developments within Islamic Medicine during the last 30 years, she suggests a framework for investigating ongoing collaborations between biomedical practitioners and proponents of tibb, focusing on three manifestations of the latter -- Galeno-Islamic therapies, South Asian Unani medicine, and Traditional Arabic Medicine (TAM) -- as they are currently practiced in India, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt. In particular, she suggests how, despite the incorporation of organizational, institutional, and methodological models derived - at least in part - from Western biomedicine, Islamic tibb, understood in its broadest sense as a medical field comprising a network of physicians, curers, herbalists, ruhani tabib (doctors of the spirit), and practitioners of Prophetic medicine, may be seen, at least in part, as a response to medical models that ignore or de-emphasize contemporary religious and ethico-moral issues of importance to Muslim physicians. Looking also at the contemporary revival of Islamic Medicine light of the responses of states, transnational medical networks, and intergovernmental organizations to ongoing medical needs and concerns, Pemberton surmises that it indexes the renewed importance of Islamic models of engagement in civil society.
Speaker Biography: Kelly Pemberton of George Washington University is the 2008 David B. Larson Fellow in Health and Spirituality.