Sub-standard or Sub-legal? Distribution, Pharma Dossiers, and Fake-talk in India

In this article, I look at Indian pharma 'dossiers'-the bundles of paperwork that testify to pharmaceutical quality and adherence to regulatory standards-and how they illustrate a wider and ongoing shift from a paradigm of drug safety to one of drug security. By examining how dossiers enact and enable claims of 'quality', I argue that it is in a drug's paperwork-rather than its chemical composition-that quality or fake-ness is produced. Based on interviews with Indian traders and officials, and an examination of how their work has changed over time in accordance with the regulatory shift to drug security, I show that in many instances the paperwork has come to be more important than the pill itself. This analysis contests the dominant pharmaco-regulatory notion of fake-ness, which privileges chemical composition above all else. In this way, my analysis of the dossier shows that drug security is itself a powerful form of fake-talk, one that informs the entire market and the conditions of possibility of international commerce today.

Rethinking Immunity: An Ethnography of Risk and Migration in Sweden

I outline the interplay between biological and socio-cultural dimensions of immunity and risk in the context of migration from Afghanistan to Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic. Documenting my interlocutors' responses to everyday situations, I explore the challenges they face in a new society. Their references to immunity reveal ideas about bodily and biological functions, as well as sociocultural aspects of risk and immunity as fluid concepts. Understanding how different groups manage risk, practice care, and perceive immunity requires attention to the circumstances that surround individual and communal experiences of care practices. I reveal their perceptions, hopes, concerns, and strategies for immunization against the real risks they encounter.

Covid, climate and comparison: A possibility for predictive analogy

This article explores how public responses to the Covid-19 pandemic could potentially help us understand the responses to the climate crisis and its environmental catastrophes. Public responses to the pandemic, in turn, also potentially help us understand the responses to the climate crisis and its environmental catastrophes. How do these compare through our epistemological lenses? Can the various Covid-19 responses function as a projection of future responses to the destabilizing climate change we are beginning to experience? Outlined are two broad conceptual overlaps: risk and epistemic dissensus. Could this become the basis of a predictive analogy to help inform anthropological research into future dimensions of climate change?

Public health crises in popular media: how viral outbreak films affect the public's health literacy

Infectious disease epidemics are widely recognised as a serious global threat. The need to educate the public regarding health and safety during an epidemic is particularly apparent when considering that behavioural changes can have a profound impact on disease spread. While there is a large body of literature focused on the opportunities and pitfalls of engaging mass news media during an epidemic, given the pervasiveness of popular film in modern society there is a relative lack of research regarding the potential role of fictional media in educating the public about epidemics. There is a growing collection of viral outbreak films that might serve as a source of information about epidemics for popular culture consumers that warrants critical examination. As such, this paper considers the motivating factors behind engaging preventive behaviours during a disease outbreak, and the role news and popular media may have in influencing these behaviours.

Tanatopolítica e biossegurança: dois regimes de governo da vida para a leishmaniose visceral canina no Brasil

Resumo Apesar de ter sua legitimidade contestada nas últimas décadas por defensores de animais, juristas e veterinários que defendem o direito à vida e ao tratamento, assim como por pesquisadores da área da saúde que duvidam de sua eficácia, a “eutanásia profilática” massiva de cães testados como soropositivos para leishmaniose visceral mantém-se firme como política sanitária no Brasil. A partir da análise de documentos oficiais, revisão da literatura, comentários sobre processos judiciais colhidos na imprensa e da etnografia dos impactos do surto de leishmaniose visceral em Porto Alegre, este artigo visa compreender o que está em jogo nessa controvérsia, considerando seus aspectos discursivos na construção de moralidades e práticas biopolíticas. Sugere-se a existência de dois regimes de governo da vida na gestão dos reservatórios caninos da leishmaniose visceral: um tanatopolítico, ligado ao poder público; o outro, um dispositivo emergente de biossegurança, ligado ao mercado farmacêutico e acessível apenas para tratamento privado.

Covid-19, biossegurança e antropologia

Resumo Sofrimento, ansiedades e incertezas estão por toda a parte em face da pandemia de Covid-19. Tem sido uma experiência impactante, contudo cada vez mais comum. Nas últimas décadas, diferentes domínios de interesse, como aquele das emergências sanitárias e do clima e da autonomia alimentar e do terrorismo, tiveram seus caminhos cruzados na mira de ações de Estado para a vigilância e o controle de humanos, animais, artefatos e ambientes. Esse movimento complexo tem semeado algumas críticas que articulam inúmeras preocupações contemporâneas. Elas performam o emergente campo da antropologia da biossegurança. O objetivo deste trabalho é fornecer uma introdução a esses debates e suas possibilidades de interseção com aqueles da antropologia da saúde, da ciência e da tecnologia, das relações humano-animal e ambientes e suas críticas a partir de conhecimentos e práticas locais.

Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema

Films illustrate 2 ways that epidemics can affect societies: fear leading to a breakdown in sociability and fear stimulating preservation of tightly held social norms. The first response is often informed by concern over perceived moral failings within society, the second response by the application of arbitrary or excessive controls from outside the community.

The Anthropology of Death Revisited

This article brings together classic work in the anthropology of death, much of which focused on funerary rites, with more recent studies, some of which continue with the classic focus and some of which introduce distinct views and problematics. The anthropology of death has become a capacious field, linking to broader debates on violence, suffering, medicine, subjectivity, race, gender, faith, modernity, and secularity (among others). In much of this work, though, we find common concerns with, and recurrent considerations of, certain themes. This review focuses on two of the most important: the symbolic imaginaries of how life conquers death; and, even more centrally, the materiality of death. A range of topics are addressed, including putrescence, burial, bones, commemorations, debts, care, sovereignty, and personal loss.

From Drug Safety to Drug Security: A Contemporary Shift in the Policing of Health

The counterfeiting of medication is increasingly seen as a major threat to health, especially in the light of both the everyday reliance on and a broadening of world-wide access to pharmaceuticals. Exaggerated or real, this threat has inaugurated, this article argues, a shift from a drug safety regime to a drug security regime that governs the flow of pharmaceuticals and brings together markets, police, and health actors in new ways. This entails a shift from soft disciplinary means aimed at incremental and continued inclusion of defaulters, to one of drastically sovereign measures of exclusion and banishment aimed at fake goods and the people associated with them, in the name of health. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study, this article shows how such new drug security efforts play themselves out especially in (South) Africa, highlighting a modus operandi of spectacular performativity and of working through suspicion and association rather than factuality, producing value less so for those in need of health than for a petty security industry itself.

Anthropology of security and security in anthropology: Cases of counterterrorism in the United States

In this article we propose a mode of analysis that allows us to consider security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. We first develop a genealogy for the anthropology of security, demarcating four main approaches: violence and state terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as ‘security assemblages.’ Security assemblages move away from focusing on security formations per se, and how much violence or insecurity they yield, to identifying and studying security forms of action, whether or not they are part of the nation-state. As an approach to anthropological inquiry and theory, it is oriented toward capturing how these forms of action work and what types of security they produce. We illustrate security assemblages through our fieldwork on counterterrorism in the domains of law enforcement, biomedical research and federal-state counter-extremism, in each case arriving at a diagnosis of the form of action. The set of distinctions that we propose is intended as an aid to studying empirical situations, particularly of security, and, on another level, as a proposal for an approach to anthropology today. We do not expect that the distinctions that aid us will suffice in every circumstance. Rather, we submit that this work presents a set of specific insights about contemporary US security, and an example of a new approach to anthropological problems.

In/visible--In/secure

In the introduction to this theme section we attempt to disentangle the webs of in/visibility and in/security by tracing out their diverse iterations. We construct a series of conversations between two of the four key terms relevant to this discussion—security and insecurity, visibility and invisibility—as a means of analyzing the different ways in which their various articulations engage meaningfully in the production and reproduction of contemporary security cultures. Ethnographic examples accompany each iteration, drawn from the work of contributors to this theme section, as well as from other contemporary research. These examples not only illustrate the multiple and shift ing intersections of in/visibility and in/security in today’s security-minded world but also remind us of the unique contributions that anthropology can make to the critical study of security.