Hangover free! The social and material trajectories of PartySmart.

This paper presents three embedded episodes in the life of a polyherbal drug indicated as a preventative measure for hangovers. Invented and marketed in 2005 by a leading ayurvedic pharmaceutical company in India, PartySmart is a reformulated compound based on ayurvedic, biomedical and phytochemical sources. This creative process has involved multiple translations, resulting in hybrid pharmacological models, including, for instance, ayurvedic post-digestive tastes and biomedical effects on enzymatic activities. These modes of therapeutic action are conceptualizations of an active drug-- i.e., a digested and metabolized drug. A problem arises, however, in the fact that the ingestion of this drug is linked to alcohol consumption in a country where it is widely considered in negative terms. For this reason, PartySmart was seen as an ambivalent presence in the firm's catalogue and thus a series of interventions aiming to uphold the image of this drug transformed both its social inscription and its materiality. This transformation also took a different, global trajectory as the drug gradually developed as a transnational pharmaceutical commodity and became a new object in new latitudes. By focusing on the social and material dimensions of this drug in these contexts, this paper calls upon science studies to expand the scope of pharmaceutical anthropology. It brings together various layers of analysis to offer new perspectives on contemporary herbal formulations as they traverse material cultures, medical epistemologies, sociopolitical borders, legal environments and social practices.

Knowledge and skill in motion: layers of Tibetan medical education in India.

This article examines the transmission of Tibetan medical knowledge in the Himalayan region of Ladakh (India), taking three educational settings as ethnographic ports of entry. Each of these corresponds to a different operating mode in the standardisation of medical knowledge and learning processes, holding profound implications for the way this therapeutic tradition is known, valued, applied and passed on to the next generation. Being at the same time a cause and a consequence of intra-regional variability in Tibetan medicine, the three institutional forms coexist in constant interaction with one another. The authors render this visible by examining the 'taskscapes' that characterize each learning context, that is to say, the specific and interlocking sets of practices and tasks in which a practitioner must be skilled in order to be considered competent. The authors build upon this notion by studying two fields of transmission and practice, relating to medicine production and medical ethics. These domains of enquiry provide a rich grounding from which to examine the transition from enskilment to education, as well as the overlaps between them, and to map out the connections linking different educational forms to social and medical legitimacy in contemporary India.