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The pharmaceutical pill is a ubiquitous object of modern medicine—it populates medicine cabinets, clinics, advertisements and our imaginations. As pills circulate through our medical and social worlds, they provide a compelling lens for anthropological exploration. In this course we will be primarily concerned with what following a pill can reveal about the kind of societies that produce, consume and regulate it. How do pharmaceuticals materialise complex intersections of culture, politics, economy, and biology?
Anthropologists have long been invested in the use of medicinal substances. Initially, however, the discipline’s focus remained restricted to non-biomedical traditions of healing and their use of various remedies that easily moved between the realms of the medicinal and the magical. The “anthropology of pharmaceuticals”, that this course is concerned with, emerged in the 1980s through its ethnographic focus on mass-manufactured, and (mostly) ingestible, medicine that in the contemporary is a defining feature of biomedicine’s relationship to cure and therapy. This field of inquiry was propelled by the need to eschew a limited emphasis on “lay” or “irrational” ways of relating to drugs in favour of a broader engagement with the trajectory of drugs from manufacturing, marketing, distribution, prescription and consumption through to government regulations and evaluations of safety and efficacy.
We will examine how pharmaceuticals shape and are shaped by human experience: how they define what counts as illness or health, how they generate trust or skepticism, and how they circulate within global systems of care, profit, and power. Pharmaceuticals connect global industrial practices with intimate experiences of healing. In so doing these material-semiotic entities expose tensions between new modes of caring for the self and the commodification of health, between the normal and the pathological, and between the right to health and the realities of profit-driven medicine. Drawing on ethnographic studies and interdisciplinary scholarship, we will trace the “social life of medicines” from development and clinical trials to distribution, prescription, and everyday use. Ultimately, this course asks students to think critically about how pharmaceuticals make and remake our worlds — bodily, politically, and morally. |