The recent emergence of Asian "traditional" medicines as increasingly popular medical, economic, and cultural resources in national and international health care policies has coincided with a renewed academic especially medical anthropological--interest in the wider topic. The realization that medical traditions like Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, or Sowa Riga haveor are currently being--transformed into modern, innovative, and lucrative industries has opened up space for exciting new perspectives and research on medical history, global health, reformulation regimes, or pharmaceutical assemblages (e.g., Lei 2014; Pordié and Gaudillière 2014a, 2014b; Kloos 2017a). To some extent, such perspectives entail a shift of focus from remote villages and rural healers to urban laboratories, corporate offices, and state policies, constituting an important step from earlier approaches that studied Asian medicines mostly through the lens of "traditional culture." Yet the industrialization and mainstreaming of Asian medicines remain partial and historically and structurally predicated on unofficial, noncapitalist, marginal actors and practices, whose agency, experiences, and narratives are easily overlooked in modern Asia, if not actively silenced. Indeed, despite a good corpus of work on "traditional medicine" in rural Asia, there are very few book-length ethnographies focusing on Asian medicine's modern development outside the centers (e.g., Craig 2012; Pordié and Kloos, forthcoming). As far as Tibetan medicine is concerned, Theresa Hofer's outstanding book Medicine and Memory in Tibet not only identifies this gap, but also fills it with a perfectly balanced combination of rich ethnography, subaltern history, and anthropological analysis.
