Session Abstract

Engaging a range of disciplinary perspectives – from anthropology to public health and epidemiology – this panel will examine the history of biomedical research on human tissues and organs in southern and central Africa and India, and the ways that history has been intimately linked to developments in the United States. Whereas a good number of historians and anthropologists have produced sophisticated and illuminating studies of biomedical expertise and its consequences in each of these national contexts, few have sought to explore the linkages, exchanges, and disjunctures between them. Papers by Catherine Burns, Lynn M. Thomas, Kavitha Sivaramakrishnan, and Marissa Mika, take up this provocation by examining the history of blood research and transfusion services and the history of organ transplant in South Africa; skin lighteners and their active ingredients and the political and commercial struggles linked to these; aging and degenerative diseases and the pathology of cancer in India and South Africa; and the afterlives of chemotherapy in trials in Uganda conducted by the American National Cancer Institute and the Makerere Medical School. Each of the papers is steeped in local and transnational scholarship and in each case finely grained epistemological questions are tracked alongside archival, interview and ethnographic work. We ask: how did international knowledge and universal corporeal templates work alongside expertise from African and Indian spaces? The ethical challenges over bodies, power, age, status, race, gender, pain and the passage of time form a central theme.

Together, we will consider three themes. First, our panel will examine the relationship between medical research and clinical medicine, on the one hand, and, on the other, the epistemological and ethical challenges posed by different bodies, distinguished most notably by gender, race, and age. Second, we will explore how dense linkages between researchers, regulators, and activists in the United States and South Africa in particular have shaped these relations between the medical and the epistemological and ethical. Third, our panel will pay close attention to how these transnational linkages have entailed contestations over the fundamental nature of both evidence and medical practice drawing in Indian and East African scholarship. We are indeed fortunate to have Julie Livingston and Megan Vaughan – two of the brightest and most imaginative historical anthropologists – working on issues of medicine and health in Africa and beyond, as the Discussant and Chair for our panel.