Abstract
The act of prescribing pharmaceutical drugs to patients is normally the site of judgements about the drug's efficacy and safety. The success of treatments and the licences for commodities depend on the biochemical identity of the drugs and of their path and transformations inside the body. However, the 'supply chain' outside the body is eschewed by such discourse, and its importance for both pharmaceutical brands and physician-centred historiographies is ignored. As this ethnographic fieldwork on Tibetan and Chinese medicines in Sichuan shows, overlooked social actors ensure reliable knowledge about medicinal things and materials long before patients take their medicine. This paper takes a step back from the final products-clearly defined as 'Tibetan' or 'Chinese'-and introduces those who produce and distribute them. Via observations of particular regimes of circulation and processing, the actions of collecting, manufacturing, transporting, and educating appear as the first and foremost acts of efficacy and safety.
Highlights
Archives and Science in ‘Han-Territory’ and in ‘Kham’ on the South-Eastern Tibetan PlateauMateria medica in China is a multi-ethnic field―increasingly globalised and highly contested―where different official and informal suppliers find and use common labels for their products
Based on my own fieldwork, I pose the following questions on how do diverse suppliers share or carry out a number of roles, how do they select information for labels on the packages of their products, and how do they communicate with each other in day-to-day trade relations about materia medica, medicine, and pharmacy? This paper demonstrates the crucial role such ethnically diverse suppliers in Sichuan Province (Sichuan sheng 四川省) play in collecting, producing, and circulating high-quality medicinals that are―as these insiders agree―specific to this province
As ‘singularities’4 they can be exempt from monetary evaluation: they circulate via a different kind of symbolic and material economy
Summary
Archives and Science in ‘Han-Territory’ and in ‘Kham’ on the South-Eastern Tibetan PlateauMateria medica in China is a multi-ethnic field―increasingly globalised and highly contested―where different official and informal suppliers find and use common labels for their products. Reliable knowledge about the identity and quality of medicinal materials is a crucial criterion to evaluate the efficacy and safety of medical treatments.1 Suppliers in present-day China carry out various roles as collectors, manufacturers, distributors, and educators to produce and exchange their materia medica knowledge within and across their different cultural, occupational, and historical contexts.
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