Paper short abstract:

The ongoing emergence of Asian medicines as modern industries of global influence and relevance indicates a major shift in medical realities globally. This paper proposes "Asian medical industries" as an innovative conceptual framework to grasp and adequately understand this new phenomenon.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decades, we can observe a diminishing interest in so-called "traditional" medicines in medical anthropology, as the empirical and theoretical focus of the discipline has shifted to mostly biomedical topics. Paradoxically, this shift coincides with an unprecedented expansion of non-biomedical healthcare during the same period, with especially Asian medicines undergoing an industrial revolution. While the healthcare industry, governments, and global organizations take this development seriously (e.g. WHO 2019), much of medical anthropology continues to frame "traditional medicine" as cultural or epistemic systems of little relevance to healthcare or anthropological theory.

In this paper, I argue that the impact of Asian medicines on healthcare, health policies, and health economies around the world will grow into a phenomenon of major proportions and global relevance in the foreseeable future. This phenomenon, however, cannot be adequately understood within the common conceptual framework of "traditional medical systems". Anticipating a revival of medical anthropological interest in Asian medicines, I therefore propose a fundamental reorientation of focus to Asian/non-biomedical health industries, as both a novel conceptual framework and a vast subject of research.

In order to outline this new approach, I define five characteristics of Asian health industries, based on my own research on contemporary Tibetan/Mongolian medicine and an overview of recent cutting-edge work on other Asian medicines. All have in common that they exceed the notions of "traditional", "Asian", and even "medicine", and instead show new ways of engaging with emerging medical realities not just in Asia, but around the world.