BAEcon Economics and Philosophy

Pharmaceutical Worlds is a Third-Year optional course unit designed primarily for students of anthropology and for intercalating medical students, though it is open to those from other disciplines. It may be taken in addition to or instead of Health and Wellbeing. The course is informed theoretically by ethnographies drawn primarily from the anthropology of medicine and from science and technology studies (STS). Topics include the relationship(s) between capitalism and medicine, pharmaceutical science and markets, industry and authorship, along with the cultural metaphors and imagery through which pharmaceutical knowledge is produced, branded, and circulated. Overall, it provides conceptual tools for decoding medical and pharmaceutical promises with anthropologically informed scepticism.Pharmaceutical Worlds is a Third-Year optional course unit designed primarily for students of anthropology and for intercalating medical students, though it is open to those from other disciplines. It may be taken in addition to or instead of Health and Wellbeing. The course is informed theoretically by ethnographies drawn primarily from the anthropology of medicine and from science and technology studies (STS). Topics include the relationship(s) between capitalism and medicine, pharmaceutical science and markets, industry and authorship, along with the cultural metaphors and imagery through which pharmaceutical knowledge is produced, branded, and circulated. Overall, it provides conceptual tools for decoding medical and pharmaceutical promises with anthropologically informed scepticism.

This course unit aims to provide a critical overview of contemporary theoretical issues in the anthropology of medicine and science and technology studies (STS). Drawing extensively upon recent ethnographies from different parts of the world in order to contextualise theoretical approaches, the course will examine some key debates and relate these debates to wider issues of theory and method in social anthropology.

• Develop anthropological eyes to see how capitalism and global inequality articulate with pharmaceutical science and medicine.
• Develop verbal skills in analysis and critique of the cultural metaphors at play in pharmaceutical research.
• Develop academic writing skills of analysis and critique in relation to core concepts in the Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies corpus.
• Understand the cultural metaphors at play in medical and psychopharmaceutical science.
• Understand how drugs get ‘personalities,’ and how drug epidemics become ‘ethnic.’

Lectures, documentaries, group seminars, and student presentations.

• Mid-term: 1000 words: worth 20%
• Final assessment: Final essay, 3000 words: worth 80%

Essays and group work will receive feedback. 

Braun, Lundy. Breathing race into the machine: The surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Hansen, Helena, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg. Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America. Univ of California Press, 2023.

Healy, David (2003) ‘Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression’ (Toronto, Ont.: Lorimer & Co).

Lakoff, Andrew. 2006. Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry. Cambridge University Press.

Petryna, Adriana, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Global pharmaceuticals: Ethics, markets, practices. Duke University Press, 2006.