Lamas and Doctors: Coexisting Systems of Life Governance in the Ganzi Tibetan Region

Modern medicine has become an important knowledge system for understanding diseases, treating the body, and determining death. However, in the Ganzi Tibetan region of Sichuan, hospitals coexist with Tibetan medicine and Buddhist practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in August 2026, this paper examines how religious and medical knowledge jointly shape understandings of illness, medical choices, and practices related to death. The study draws on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with doctors, translators, local residents and monks. It finds that modern medicine primarily addresses the physical aspects of illness, while lamas and religious practices interpret its causes, timing, meaning, and implications for the afterlife. Translation, divination, and community relations connect these knowledge systems in everyday decision-making. Rather than replacing one another, religion and medicine operate at different moments and sometimes in parallel. The governance of life and death in the Ganzi Tibetan region therefore emerges from their negotiated coexistence, challenging a simple opposition between tradition and modernity or faith and science.