Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Stephan Kloos received his PhD in Medical Anthropology from the Universities of California, San Francisco and Berkeley in 2010, and has been working as a researcher, director, and deputy director at the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) since 2011. After leading various international research projects (ERC, MSCA, FWF), he received his venia docendi (Habilitation) from the University of Vienna’s Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2022, where he is regularly lecturing. For the past 20+ years, his work on Tibetan medicine and nationalism has sought to contribute to wider medical and social anthropological debates on exile, postcolonialism, humanitarianism, global health, Tibetan politics, and the socioeconomic transformations of Asia. For a full CV and list of talks, projects, and publications, see www.stephankloos.org.

Selected Publications

• Kloos & Blaikie (eds.) 2022. Asian Medical Industries: Contemporary Perspectives on Traditional Pharmaceuticals. Routledge, 352 pages.
• Pordié & Kloos (eds.) 2022. Healing at the Periphery: Ethnographies of Tibetan Medicine in India. Durham: Duke University Press, 211 pages.
• Kloos, Madhavan, Tidwell, Blaikie & Cuomu 2020. The Transnational Sowa Rigpa Industry in Asia: New Perspectives on an Emerging Economy. Social Science & Medicine 245: 112617
• Kloos 2020. Humanitarianism from Below: Sowa Rigpa, the Traditional Pharmaceutical Industry, and Global Health. Medical Anthropology 39(2): 167-181
• Kloos 2017. The Pharmaceutical Assemblage: Rethinking Sowa Rigpa and the Herbal Pharmaceutical Industry in Asia. Current Anthropology 58(6): 693-717
• Kloos 2017. The Politics of Preservation and Loss: Tibetan Medical Knowledge in Exile. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (EASTS) 11(2): 135-159
• Kloos 2016. The Recognition of Sowa Rigpa in India: How Tibetan Medicine Became an Indian Medical System. Medicine, Anthropology, Theory 3(2): 19-49