Whether considering how American drug companies seek to create a market for antidepressants in Japan, how Brazil has created a model HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment program, or how the urban poor in Delhi understand and access healthcare, these essays illuminate the roles of corporations, governments, NGOs, and individuals in relation to global pharmaceuticals. Some essays show how individual and communal identities are affected by the marketing and availability of medications. Among these are an exploration of how the pharmaceutical industry shapes popular and expert understandings of mental illness in North America and Great Britain. There is also an examination of the agonizing choices facing Ugandan families trying to finance AIDS treatment. Several essays explore the inner workings of the emerging international pharmaceutical regime. One looks at the expanding quest for clinical research subjects; another at the entwining of science and business interests in the Argentine market for psychotropic medications. By bringing the moral calculations involved in the production and distribution of pharmaceuticals into stark relief, this collection charts urgent new territory for social scientific research.
Contributors. Kalman Applbaum, João Biehl, Ranendra K. Das, Veena Das, David Healy, Arthur Kleinman, Betty Kyaddondo, Andrew Lakoff, Anne Lovell, Lotte Meinert, Adriana Petryna, Michael A. Whyte, Susan Reynolds Whyte
Adriana Petryna is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Fellow, Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl.
Andrew Lakoff is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry.
Arthur Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Professor of Medical Anthropology, and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University. Among his books are Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine and The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition.