Abstract:

Hospital is the key institution that matters to each and every individual’s health. How it is managed and developed are fundamental for the welfare of individual human being. I aim to study the everyday practice of a county-level hospital in TAR and how it is shaped by the efforts of development aid to strengthen the health delivery capacity of the institution and hospital staff, focusing on the entanglement of power, structure, and practice of a county hospital. This research will investigate the bureaucratic structure of a county hospital on three levels: first, how development aid support shapes the function of the hospital; second, how different departments within the hospital function as asymmetrical biomedical system and Tibetan medical system to govern the people; Third, what are the factors influencing the doctors’ practices in this hospital in the co-existing medical systems respectively. Through participatory observation of the operation of the hospital, semi-structured interviews to hospital management staff, clinical staff, logistics staff, aid workers, and visiting personnel from other institutions, and archive researches, this research will be a hospital ethnography to explore the embodiment of the institution in the whole health system in TAR and embodiment of the people within it.