Abstracts
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Abstracts |
Throughout human history, medicines and ideas about them have been mobile. Substances reputed to heal or strengthen the body have been traded across geographical and social divides. Ideas about the qualities and powers of medicines have been spread, appropriated and transformed from one setting to another. But the pace of these movements increased exponentially from the mid-nineteenth century, when the fine chemical industries in Germany began to synthesize drugs and produce them on a large scale. Today, medicinal drugs constitute a brilliant example of globalization. Commercially produced pharmaceuticals are part of the locally available materia medica in every part of the world.
As commodities biomedical drugs have special characteristics. They are developed and manufactured in one context of knowledge that specifies how they should be used. Especially the most powerful drugs, such as antibiotics and psycho-pharmaceuticals, are meant to be administered under the control of medical professionals. The scientific and moral authority of biomedicine underwrites their status as too valuable for indiscriminate consumption. But as commodities, medicines are carried into other contexts of knowledge where they are sold in shops and markets, and used as tokens of hope and healing by people who have other ideas about their powers. Their alleged capacity to change body-minds and alleviate suffering makes them extremely attractive commodities.
The worldwide spread of pharmaceuticals occurs through international marketing channels that are the topic of critical public attention. Anthropological studies illuminate less well known aspects of these processes. They focus on the way medicinal commodities become meaningful in different lifeworlds - in Metro-Manila or rural Uganda. Pharmaceuticals are understood in terms of local ideas about bodies, illnesses, and treatment. But they also transform those ideas, as health is commodified and people become consumers of medicinal products produced by distant manufacturers.