The Pulse in the Machine: Automating Tibetan Diagnostic Palpation in Postsocialist Russia

Abstract

This article analyzes efforts by Soviet and present-day scientists in Russia to “rationalize” and ultimately automate the diagnostic techniques of Tibetan medicine. It tracks the institutional and conceptual histories of designing a pulse diagnostic system, a project that began in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. It has recently been re-enlivened in Buryatia, an ethnic minority region in Southeastern Siberia, in efforts to mobilize indigenous medical practices in response to local and national public health concerns. I focus on the translational ideologies that informed efforts to develop the pulsometer as a medical imaging technology, and analyze obstacles to these efforts found at the core of the device. Scientists working on the pulsometer have systematically tried to discern whether their measurements indicate sustained bodily pathologies, or instead reflect only technological white noise, and they still recruit and rely on the embodied expertise of practitioners of Tibetan medicine to validate their findings. In so doing they reaffirm claims that Tibetan medicine in Buryatia is inextricable from the forms of knowledge and practice that their projects work to standardize. I show how the apparent failures at perfect mechanization have made the pulsometer a surprisingly productive site for creating new kinds of expert communities and forms of knowledge making.

Pulse Wave Harmony: Ancient Wisdoms for Modern Age

“…Transformation (8) and Stability (12). The inclusion criteria were as follows: Healthy subjects, having a relation with the Institute Lama Tzong Khapa and/or living in the residential area close by, and willing to be enrolled for the entire duration of this study.…”

“…In the last 20 years, there has been fast growing development of digital pulse wave analysis approaches developed primarily in Asia, China, Korea and Russia, where traditional pulse reading were strongly developed. A few works have been done using the specific technique of Tibetan Pulse Reading and among the first was the Institute of Physical Materials Science of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Ulan Ude in Buryatia led by Prof. Vitaly Vasylevich in 1983 [8]. Nowadays digital pulse wave reading technologies are quickly evolving both in terms of miniaturization and accuracy.…”

Caring for Strangers: Aging, Traditional Medicine, and Collective Self‐care in Post‐socialist Russia

“…In Russia, the boundaries between biomedicine and its therapeutic alternatives are inflected by a scientific and institutional history specific to a Soviet modernity (Raikhel ). Therefore, they do not straightforwardly map onto the politics of complementary and alternative medicine outlined above, and many techniques and principles associated with TM—e.g., acupuncture—are, in fact, incorporated into mainstream medical care (Chudakova ). In this sense, self‐care is not so much problematic because it is associated with TM but because it is attributed to a segment of the population that is already marginalized.…”