Biographical interviews with Tibetan women in rural Amdo (Qinghai Province, Ghina) indicate that many women above 40 years of age experienced family planning as a threat to their reproductive health, social status and economic production. Even though family planning, implemented since 1980, was experienced differently among the targeted women, they nevertheless addressed the same social pressure of having to reconcile normative birth control administered by the Ghinese state with Tibetan socio-cultural norms and values of fertility focused upon preferences for sons. Renowned female Tibetan doctors in private and public clinics and hospitals were Tibetan women's preferred and trusted addressees for voluntary birth control and reproductive health. I argue therefore, that in order to understand the effects of family planning on targeted Tibetan women, socio-cultural values of fertility need to be taken into account as they are expressed in women's narratives of their bio-psycho-social, gendered and ethnic selves.

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Tibetan medicines are key material objects for medical treatment and have become part of a global trend of 'pharmaceuticalisation', playing increasingly important political and socio-economic roles in an 'alternative modernity'. As I argue in this paper, they also have become key 'sites of contestation' between different epistemic values and styles of practice related to efficacy and safety that are reproduced in and through specific formulation regimes. Based on my multisited ethnography of production, prescription, and use practices of Tibetan medicines in China and Europe, this paper conceptualises three distinct formulation regimes, offering a heuristic model for transnational comparison-a classical, an industrialised or reformulated, and a polyherbal regime. The first two are the major orientations while the polyherbal is a conjoint hybrid with either the classical or the industrialised formulation regime. Globalised national drug safety regulations legalise and confer legitimacy to industrialised Tibetan formulas that follow biomedically defined efficacy, safety, and disease categories, while classical formulas produced by private physicians or small-scale cottage pharmacies are increasingly marginalised as producing 'unsafe' and at times illegal medicines, and need to find new ways for adapting and circulating their formulas.

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