Literature+notes

//Differences in Medicine// edited by Annemarie Mol and Marc Berg collects essays describing the case for seeing biomedicine as multiple and distinct in different context. The work’s essays focus on interactions of Biomedicine in diverse locales (From California to United Kingdom, from sex-change surgery to asthma drugs and arteriosclerosis) as the locales form a key component to the composition of distinct sub-phenomena. This fragmentation of a broad class, in this case Biomedicine, parallels the empirical findings regarding sciences in general in the field of STS

a review of ethnography on the global scale and linking to the concept and shifting phenomenon of globalization. Argues for the "destabilization" of the "embededness of social relations" in historical communities and places. while not delocalizing, they argue that the global process is instantiated in local action and social actors, but that as the permanant linkage of actor to place diminishes so does the ability to study these social actions in a single place.(Gille and Riain 2002) this has been described as a vital and growing theme in social history of medicine (Lowy 2007)

"a diversity of social discourses and practices that speak to the mutation of the body, the permeability of the body, the transformation and restabalization of embodiment as symbolic sites where the relationship between nation-state identities and glpbalized experience is being worked out, fantasized, contradicted, and occasionally reconciled." (Seremetakis 2001; p115)

In brief summary of the argument for the diminishing importance of the nation-state Jurgen Habermas writes that: “First, the economic problems of affluent societies can be explained by structural changes in the world economy, now commonly known as ‘globalization.’ Second, this transformation restricts national governments, rendering them less able to ‘cushion’ undesirable social and political side-effects of transnational economic transactions.”(Habermas 1998)

The power of scientization is in part the perceived transportability of scientific decision making between contexts, thus standard setting and the formation of metrics forms a key development, how each of these is enacted in different sites is…

The importance of international standards “this occurred through the conceptualisation of practices, that is the enunciation and encapsulation of their generic properties into an exportable formula.”(Demortain 2008)

A growing literature about the differentiation of medical experience, practice and knowledges as biomedical institutions develop across, between or enter new national contexts (Frost et al. 2007; Lakoff 2006; Inhorn 2003; Kahn 2000; Ong and Peletz 1995)

In regards to biotechnology the literature on local variation has been extensive (Rajan 2006)(Jasanoff 2007)(Parthasarathy 2007)(Fortun 2008)(Lewontin 1993)

Below sections in (Tucker 1997) Case of Bayer and its globalization in the 1930s, taking advantage of Egyptian nationalism by advertising Aspro pain relievers by saying it was "National Medicine, you will not be in pain anymore" and "by such means, global capital aligned itself with nationalist development ideology"(p115) These companies mobilized armies of representatives to market their products in the global south, both directly to doctors and to public health programs, and maintained a "virtual monopoly of the production of medical knowledge" in these areas (Tucker 1997,p117)

"the position of medicine today 'is akin to that of state religions yesterday' [quoting from Friedson]. Like modernization and development [Medicine] carries notions of manifest destiny which no indigenous system can claim. These aspirations are backed by vast finanacial and technological resources and sophisticared persuasive strategies." (tucker p. Tucker 125)

Pharmaceutical anthropology (ie. Van Der Geest 1987) draws attention to the way that perception, experience and efficacy of drugs are connected closely to local conditions an culture (Tucker 122)