Re-defining Pharmaceutical Efficacy and Safety in Contemporary Exile-Tibetan Medicine

The proposed project will use ethnographic research methods to produce the first comprehensive study of the pharmaceutical production of Tibetan medicine in exile. Besides generating hitherto non-existent qualitative and quantitative data on the topic (what quantities are produced where, and under what conditions, etc.), it will particularly focus on contemporary exile-Tibetan notions of pharmaceutical efficacy, safety and quality. How are these concepts defined or redefined in pharmaceutical practice and on the traditional pharma market, and how are these redefinitions connected to larger transformations of exile-Tibetan culture and society? This study builds on the results of the PI`s previous FWF-funded project, which show how Tibetan medicine has become a central domain where modern Tibetan culture, identity and nation are configured. At the same time, Tibetan medicine itself is increasingly defined and evaluated through its pharmaceutical products, mostly in the form of pills. By examining the production of Tibetan pills and the construction of their efficacy in a wider context, this research will also reveal the ways in which the capitalist market, global health policies, and transnational regimes of pharmaceutical regulation or intellectual property rights congeal in local health care scenarios, ethnic identity, imaginaries of the nation, and our very notions of what we consider efficacious or not. The 36 months` multi-sited research will focus on exile-Tibetan manufacturers of Tibetan medicine in India and Nepal, and will be based at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences

This FWF project was concluded after only 8 months in order to avoid a funding overlap with the project leaders beginning ERC Starting Grant on a similar topic. Nevertheless, the background research and preparatory fieldwork conducted during that time yielded some significant preliminary results. Most importantly, a list of Tibetan pharmaceutical producers in India has been compiled, including not only large medical institutions but also smaller private manufacturers. About half of these producers have been visited on site, and basic information on their production volumes, modes of production, and turnover has been gathered. While more research is necessary, this data (not to mention access to the contacts) constitutes an essential foundation for any research on the Tibetan medicine industry in India. Based on this data, it has become clear that there is a large and partly unmet demand for Tibetan pharmaceuticals in India today, thereby creating ideal conditions for a Tibetan pharmaceutical industry to emerge. This is indeed happening and constitutes a very lucrative business for the manufacturers. While there are still no legal regulations concerning the quality and safety of Tibetan pharmaceuticals in India, the complexity of producing these drugs, as well as the strong peer-control among doctors, have ensured continuing high (traditional) standards of production as well as a relatively slow growth rate so far. However, in actual pharmaceutical production, a whole range of changes necessitated by the scale of production and international consumption can be observed, ranging from substitutions of raw materials to different processing technologies to changed formulas. The projects hypothesis that Tibetan medicines entrance in the pharmaceutical market affects its pharmaceutical production and attending notions of safety and efficacy therefore appears to be correct, although more research is clearly necessary. Several formal and informal research collaborations have been formed to benefit from an international network of researchers working on the traditional pharmaceutical industry in Asia. Thus, the PI was elected council member of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicines (IASTAM), and joined the research networks PharmAsia (CNRS, France) and South Asian Medical Heritages (University of Leiden, Netherlands).Despite the short project duration, a chapter for an edited volume was submitted and accepted for publication in 2014, and several guest lectures and international conference presentations were delivered. Over all, the 8 months of this project were highly productive, yielding important preliminary results upon which other research projects, such as Kloos ERC Starting Grant, can build.