Sowa Rigpa Humanitarianism: Local Logics of Care within a Global Politics of Compassion
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the circulation of humanitarian ideas, materials, and actions in a non-biomedical and non-Judeo-Christian context: Sowa Rigpa or Tibetan medical camps in India and Nepal. Through these camps, practitioners and patients alike often overtly articulate Sowa Rigpa medicine as part of a broader humanitarian "good" motivated by a Buddhist-inflected ethics of compassion and a moral economy of care, diverging from mainstream public health and conventional humanitarian projects. Three ethnographic case studies demonstrate how micro-political interactions at camps engage with ethical and religious imaginaries. We show how the ordinary ethics of Sowa Rigpa humanitarianism gain distinct political meaning in contrast to non-Tibetan forms of aid, reconfiguring the relationship between Buddhism, essential medicines, moral economies, and politics. While Sowa Rigpa as a medical system operates transnationally, these camps are organized around local logics of emergent care, employing narratives of "charity" and Buddhist compassion when addressing health needs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it