For my doctorate (2006-2010) I explored the creation of a Tibetan medicine industry in the People’s Republic of China and its stake in shaping contemporary Tibet. Within a mere decade hospital pharmacies throughout the Tibetan areas of China have been converted into pharmaceutical companies. Confronted with the logic of capital and profit, these companies now produce commodities for a nation-wide market.
While these developments are depicted as a big success by official China, they also meet with harsh criticism in Tibet. It is moaned that the prices are on the rise, the quality of medicines is decreasing. Moreover, the industry, which primarily relies on herbs collected form the wild, is made responsible for the rapid disappearance of several medicinal plant species from the Tibetan Plateau. The quick and forced industrialisation touches upon much more than technical strategies of manufacturing Tibetan medicines. What is at stake is a fundamental (re-)manufacturing of Tibetan Medicine as a system of knowledge and practice.
The industry of Tibetan medicine lies at the intersection of conflicting visions and agendas for Tibet. It serves as an allegorical figure of Tibet’s rapid development and progress, its medicines are the target of a booming “ethnicity industry”, and the formulas serve as a showcase for the state’s efforts to protect Tibet’s cultural heritage. At the same time, it provides a relatively unpolitical realm for a variety of Tibetan initiatives. As Tibetan medicine is both high on the agenda of the Party State’s Tibet policies and an important aspect of Tibetan self-understanding, its industrialisation has emerged as an arena where these different visions and agendas clash and mingle. My inquiry into the industry focusses on the companies producing Tibetan medicines, their tactics and strategies, their ethical reasoning and engagement in the market not only for pills and remedies but also for Tibetanness – a market, I argue, that bears the characteristics of a moral economy at large, enmeshed in the global political spectacle that surrounds the “Tibet question” and China’s rise as a world power.
One book and four peer-reviewed papers resulted from this research project:
Saxer, Martin. 2013. Manufacturing Tibetan Medicine. The Creation of An Industry and the Moral Economy of Tibetanness. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.
Saxer, Martin. 2013. Re-Fusing Ethnicity and Religion: An Experiment on Tibetan Grounds. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, forthcoming, accepted for publication.
———. 2011. Herbs and Traders in Transit: Border Regimes and Trans-Himalayan Trade in Tibetan Medicinal Plants. Asian Medicine 5 (2009): 317-339.
———. 2012a. A Goat's Head on a Sheep's Body? Manufacturing Good Practices for Tibetan Medicine. Medical Anthropology 31 (6): 497-513.
———. 2012b. The Moral Economy of Cultural Identity. Tibet, Cultural Survival, and the Safeguarding of Cultural Heritage. Civilisations 61 (1): 65-81.