Emilia G . Sanabria | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research (original) (raw)

Books / Edited Collections by Emilia G . Sanabria

Plastic Bodies provides an ethnographic account of sex hormone use in Bahia, examining how hormon... more Plastic Bodies provides an ethnographic account of sex hormone use in Bahia, examining how hormones are enrolled to create, mold or discipline social relations and subjectivities. The book traces the mutually constitutive coming-into-beings of bodies and hormones in Bahia. It examines how the scientific concept “sex hormones” is materialized into pharmaceuticals and how, as drugs, hormones are taken up by users, and absorbed into everyday understandings of the body. Plastic Bodies attends to the materiality of sex hormones while arguing that their efficacies cannot be reduced to their pharmacological properties. It provides a genealogy of the practice of menstrual suppression which grew out of Cold War neo-Malthusian concerns with overpopulation in the Global South and is being re-marketed as a practice of pharmaceutical self-enhancement couched in neoliberal notions of choice. Plastic bodies situates this practice within the Bahian biomedical landscape, examining the role of medical institutions and practices in Brazilian social life and class processes. Menstrual suppression is analyzed alongside other biomedical interventions into lived bodies and the concept of plasticity is put forward to reveal that bodies are not imagined as fixed but are the objects of constant work. Given this plasticity, and its potentially “explosive” character, the book asks how should the good of bodily interventions be assessed. The conclusion proposes a critical reading of biomedical intervention that that does not mourn for the loss of a natural referent or invest too much hope in an endlessly flexible promissory future.

American Anthropologist, 2023

This collection of essays takes up the challenge of storying with plants. It begins with the prem... more This collection of essays takes up the challenge of storying with plants. It begins with the premise that such a feat was made impossible within a very particular set of circumstances (Federici 2004; Wynter 1995; Tsing 2015; Haraway, Tsing, and Mitman 2019; Stengers 1997, 2019). Drawing inspiration on Sylvia Wynter, Afro-feminist poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020:xii) narrates the process by which she allowed more-than-human stories to arise through her: "I began to understand that the scientific taxonomy of what constituted a species or which family, phyla, genus, in some cases even kingdom and domain, a particular form of life was as debatable and discursively unstable as the narratives within my family of who was an inside or an outside child, and who was related and why and how, and certainly as complex as what Wynter teaches us about: the discursive construction of man. I had to understand that when I reached out for my ancestors I couldn’t (like population geneticists do) just stop at some point of relation that would be marketably salient to my ego’s prior understanding of who I am now. My listening began to include speakers who have never been considered human."
In her introduction to Octavia’s Brood – a collection of speculative fiction written by movement organisers and inspired by the work of Octavia E. Butler – Walidah Imarisha (Imarisha and Brown 2015:3) reminds us that “the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless."
In this spirit, we ask: How have the social and human science been shackled by anthropocentric imaginaries? What does it mean to decolonize our relations to plants? Which kinship forms can thrive and what stories can be told that help us imagine our relationship to plants beyond anthropocentrism and colonization? Within the encounter between storytelling and science, how can traditional knowledges surrounding plants dialogue with the biosciences? How can Indigenous languages and traditional ways of telling with plants be made present in order to write futures otherwise? What can a speculative anthropology of plants be? What are the speculative gestures that allow for nonlinear, interspecific, enmeshed, regenerative, socially just and liveable futures? What stories can we tell that partake in undoing dichotomies between wild and domesticated plants, and teleologies that suggest a linear progression from domestication to agriculture to the plantationocene? Can we imagine that, maybe, humans are the ones cultivated by plants? What tales can be told about the encounters unfolding in gardens?
Alongside those who generate “visionary fiction” (Imarisha 2020) from enduring conditions of oppression we invite the crafting of “phytofutures” as imaginations rooted in the liberation of instrumentalized relations between humans and plants, leading to more socially and ecologically just futures.
In mobilizing the notion of “future” we imagine time as part of the decolonizing adventure, reclaiming time as non-linear, non-anticipatory explorations of other ontological possibilities, of non-human perspectives and of spiralling connections and reconnections of emerging pasts and already present futures. What stories can be told from the place where human boundaries are shown to be deeply porous to and co-constituted through mutualistic breathing and feeding cycles as plants and humans (and all their other kin) co-become with each other.

This special issue aims to widen the dialogue between anthropology of health and science studies ... more This special issue aims to widen the dialogue between anthropology of health and science studies around the question of evidence based-medicine. It does so by bringing together a collection of empirical, case-based studies at the juncture of these two intellectual traditions, which critically engage with the possibilities and constraints imposed by the paradigm of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), in its myriad local variations.
Science and technology studies (STS) research on global biomedicine has grown, but often in isolation from conversations and debates in medical anthropology. Critiques of STS have suggested that its practice of fieldwork is too constrained, and that it has demonstrated a heavy-handed approach to forcing data to fit pre-established theoretical framework. Critics of medical anthropology point to the fact that the thick descriptions of local knowledge and health-seeking practice are often counter-posed to a monolithic and “black-boxed” vision of biomedicine. Yet can we do without a real exchange between these two disciplines? While the paradigm of evidence-based medicine seems to enjoy unquestioned legitimacy today, everyone agrees that this legitimacy is the by-product of on-going work engaging life sciences experts, health specialists and of the mobilization of social and political dynamics. Thus evidence-based medicine is the result of an effort which, although taking the appearance of evidence, is the result of a process that aims to build its own legitimacy. Based on processes rather than given facts, EBM is at the heart of the debate we hope to develop in this volume. We propose to do this by attending to three sub-questions: the first concerns the making of evidence; the second turns to the relation between evidentiary practices, bodies and statistical knowledge and the last examines the manner in which the logics of EBM are driving policy decisions.

BioSocieties (Special Issue), Jun 2015

This special issue examines the specific uncertainties raised by the flows and feedbacks operatin... more This special issue examines the specific uncertainties raised by the flows and feedbacks operating between the production of evidence and the making of policy in the domain of alimentary science. We employ the term “aliment” – that which nourishes the body – to reinvigorate a valuable but underutilized concept, enriching the vocabulary with which to address the recent proliferation of scientific examinations of the relation between food and health. This collective analysis of the treatment of food in the domain of health highlights how information does not flow linearly across an expert/lay divide but is shaped by complex feedback loops between practices of expertise and management, care and communication, and the domestic, intimate, and industrial contexts in which decisions about food are made. The papers detail the uncertainties that emerge in response to the problem of intervening on intricate biological systems, themselves embedded in elaborate societal frameworks.

There is an important corpus of anthropological studies on Central and Latin America, but such st... more There is an important corpus of anthropological studies on Central and Latin America, but such studies frequently focus on issues of ‘tradition’: indigenous cultures and their contemporary transformations, multiple modernities, the reinventions of local traditions, traditional forms of healing, religious cultures, or racisms. However, in spite of the fact that Latin American countries often have advanced medical services, available to selected, but variable segments of the population and, in some countries, well developed biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, there are not many anthropological studies on the effects of these developments in Latin America. Or, to be more accurate, there are excellent and highly innovative studies on these subject, but because they are framed in a variety of ways and seldom read together, it is difficult to produce a coherent image of the conditions and consequences of biomedicalization in Latin America.

This special issue of Manguinhos (História, Ciências, Saúde) aims to fill this gap by revealing the scope of anthropological perspectives on biomedicine in Latin America in domains such as access to health care, clinical trials, genetics and genomics, sexual and reproductive health, chronic diseases, mental health or enhancement technologies. It interrogates processes of biomedicalization from a series of Latin American case studies, examining the myriad and stratified forms that the “globalization” of biomedicine has taken across the continent. The papers collectively problematize the idea of a globalized biomedicine travelling from a putative center to its Latin American periphery and interrogate the various forms Latin American biomedical practices take in response to diverse national health systems, local biologies or postcolonial histories.

Articles / Chapters by Emilia G . Sanabria

Vibrant - Virtual Brazilian Anthropology Journal , 2025

With the rapid advancement of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) trials, psychedelic clinics are ... more With the rapid advancement of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) trials, psychedelic clinics are set to become a tangible reality in the near-future. Questions abound concerning the therapeutic modalities that will be adopted, the human and material infrastructures that will enable the delivery of this novel form of healthcare and their funding model – which will have direct implications for who can access PATs. In this paper, we reflect on the process of designing, organizing and holding a speculative space to imagine possible future ayahuasca care spaces. Ayahuasca healing practices are (still) mostly indissociable from their ritual settings, placing them in complex and ambivalent relation to “psychedelics” and PATs. Speculation enabled us to collaboratively address questions of appropriation, commodification, standardization and pharmaceuticalization of plant medicines, and explore the more-than-human contours of care. Our goal was to shift the parameters of our interactions with key interlocutors in “the field” in ways that enable co-laboration and co-re-definition. We discuss the process of creating this speculative space of encounter, of defining its parameters and designing the framework within which such a conversation is even possible.

In this article, we provide a genealogy of the concept of integration and a discussion of the mul... more In this article, we provide a genealogy of the concept of integration and a discussion of the multiplicity of practices it encompasses in the field of psychedelic medicine. We propose that caring for integration has often been a way to care for psychedelic-assisted therapy clinical trial outcome measures. This delegates efficacy to the substance rather than to the synergistic intervention, which is at odds with the original motivation for integration. We propose that integration – in much of its current iteration – presumes a bounded “self,” occulting the deep ties that link individuals to their societal and relational contexts. As psychedelic-assisted interventions garner growing support and financial interest we ask: To what extent will practices of integration be able to address questions concerning the violence of normative social orders, in particular to non-white, non-cis, otherwise abled subject positions? Is the core goal to adapt the person to a potential toxic or otherwise unhealthy environment or to support the person in transforming societal norms that are oppressive or deleterious? We conclude that health interventions that individualize societal problems partake in the erosion of collective mental health programs and interventions or forms of local expertise and knowledge that hold communities together.

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2024

Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances has gar- nered spectacular inte... more Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances has gar- nered spectacular international attention. Most of this focuses on research in the Global North. In this article, we examine Brazil’s scientific contribu- tion to the psychedelic renaissance. Brazilian psychedelic science thrives thanks to a strong pharmaceutical innovation system and the legal status of ayahuasca, which has allowed it to develop a distinctive, globally relevant research paradigm. Unlike in many countries, this research program is mostly publicly funded through universities, showcasing Latin America’s ability to produce competitive science despite oftentimes severe financial limitations. In part shaped by traditions of saúde coletiva, social medicine, psychiatric reform, and harm reduction activism, Brazilian psychedelic sci- ence has historically maintained close ties to local communities of knowl- edge, particularly the ayahuasca churches, some of which have partnered with clinical research laboratories. Drawing on ethnographic research with actors of the Brazilian psychedelic research community we arguethat provincializing the psychedelic renaissance means challenging the patent-driven, neoliberal mindset that makes the idea of a shared, publicly funded psychedelic research commons seem impossible. We show that this ideal has nevertheless been quietly put into practice in places like Brazil, at least as long as its universities received adequate public funding.

American Anthropologist , 2023

Phyto—derived from the Greek phýein, meaning “to bring forth, produce, to grow, spring up”1 and f... more Phyto—derived from the Greek phýein, meaning “to bring forth, produce, to grow, spring up”1 and forming words with the sense “of relating to, or resembling (that of) a plant.”

Future—that is to be, relating to, or constituting a tense expressive of time yet to come.

PhytoFutures—speculative gestures of bringing forth, growing, and multiplying that-which-is-to-be-with-plants through collective
imaginative practices.

Plot—“African peasants transplanted to the plot all the structure of values that had been created by traditional societies of Africa, the land remained the Earth—and the Earth was a goddess . . . his funeral was the mystical reunion with the Earth. . . . Around the growing of yam, of food for survival, he created on the plot a folk culture. . . . This folk culture became a source of cultural guerilla resistance to the plantation system” (Wynter, 1971).

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality, 2023

This chapter explores future orientations for gender and sexuality in anthropology. After a brief... more This chapter explores future orientations for gender and sexuality in anthropology. After a brief incursion into anthropological engagements with future-making, modernity and the straightness of settler time, the chapter turns to queer and feminist science and technology studies work on the projection of anthropocentric understanding of gender and sexuality onto natural worlds. Despite the exuberance of nonhuman sexualities, sexual reproduction is still seen as the apex of evolution and the social sciences still struggle to fully think gender and sexuality outside of (biological) reproduction. The chapter then turns to a discussion of Haraway and Clarke’s call for a multispecies reproductive justice that takes on the vexed question of over-population. This call, while important in its quest to free kinship from chrono-hetero-normative reproductive imperatives leverages apocalyptic futurisms and overlooks the myriad ways Indigenous and Black communities have long been in relation with human and more-than-human kin. It concludes with reflections on the importance of resisting grand explicative gestures characteristic of patriarchal logics and technological solutions, positing liveable future as the capacity to thrive and regenerate through the heinous violence that continues to mark the world. It invites anthropologists to ponder what futures the work they do perpetuate or make possible.

Ilha - Revista de Antropologia , 2023

Esta revisão aborda um conjunto crescente de trabalhos situados na intersecção entre a antropolog... more Esta revisão aborda um conjunto crescente de trabalhos situados na intersecção entre a antropologia e os estudos sociais da ciência e tecnologia (CTS) que examinam como as drogas são tornadas eficazes nos laboratórios, em contextos terapêuticos e na vida cotidiana. Essa literatura ressalta como os interesses comerciais e as preocupações sociais modelam os tipos de efeitos farmacêuticos que são colocados em prática, e como certas eficácias são bloqueadas devido a questões morais. Os trabalhos reunidos aqui revelam como as instituições reguladoras e os atores envolvidos nas políticas públicas de saúde tentam estabilizar as ações farmacêuticas. Ao mesmo tempo, nas linhas de frente do cuidado, farmacêuticos, trabalhadores da saúde e usuários procuram ajustar as dosagens e as indicações, buscando adaptar as ações farmacêuticas a circunstâncias específicas. Nós mostramos que não existe um objeto (farmacêutico) puro que precede sua socialização. Os fármacos não são "descobertos"; eles são constituídos e reproduzidos em relação a contextos mutáveis. Esta revisão delineia cinco áreas-chave nas pesquisas etnográficas e nos estudos CTS que examinam tais drogas fluidas.

American Ethnologist , 2020

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, 2021

This chapter brings together ethnographic work on technologies of healing, pharmaceutical and psy... more This chapter brings together ethnographic work on technologies of healing, pharmaceutical and psychedelic clinical trials, and ceremonial uses of the Amazonian herbal brew ayahuasca. Building on a review of anthropological work on clinical trials, we argue that randomized control trials (RCTs), even psychedelic ones, have been captured by the pharmaceutical industry in its quest to grow profits rather than reduce illness. We track the role that the category of technology plays in continued industrialized colonial, genocidal and dispossessive violence. This includes institutions of intellectual property, evidence-based medicine, RCTs, pharmaceuticals, drugs, active ingredients, industrial medicine, diagnostic standards, investment capital and treatment sovereignty. Using the idea of container technologies, we discuss how psychedelic clinical trials attempt to experimentally expand the magic bullet to reveal set and setting. We contrast this with arguments by Indigenous scholars that ayahuasca is not a psychedelic, and that ceremonial work cannot be separated from ongoing colonial violence. Holding space for ceremonial work means refusing to know what the problem is ahead of the encounter with the plant-spirit. Such settings are explicitly anti-causal, unpredictable, and deeply paradoxical, allowing something to happen that is not reducible to action, intention or the act of containing.

BioSocieties , 2021

Ayahuasca is a herbal brew that is widespread in indigenous Upper Amazon and has undergone global... more Ayahuasca is a herbal brew that is widespread in indigenous Upper Amazon and has undergone global expansion in the last decade. As it is taken up in an ever growing range of ritual or experimental practices questions of authority, authenticity, propriety or safety become acute. This case allows us to interrogate contemporary processes of value-making as radically different and highly stratified values encounter each other, on the brink of a possible pharmaceuticalization of ayahuasca. I argue that ayahuasca is not fully captured by the value-logics of capital and examine the ways in which its promissory dimensions, global circulation and entry into practices of biomedical evidence-making position it in an ambiguous space that is nevertheless not entirely outside the logics of capital. The circuits of ayahuasca’s valorisation reveal a complex coproduction of value that makes strategic use of various scales, sites and situations. The article examines the promissory horizon of extra-pharmacological value identified as key to understanding the efficacy of psychedelic substances such as ayahuasca. It then attends to the extraction of value from plants before closing with a reflexion on the politics of inclusion in the discussions that frame ayahuasca’s value globally.

Cultural Anthropology , 2018

Etymologically speaking, hormones excite: appetites, metabolism, growth, circadian rhythms, heart... more Etymologically speaking, hormones excite: appetites, metabolism, growth, circadian rhythms, heart rates, menstrual cycles, spermatogenesis, lactation, or libido, to name but some of the more culturally marked processes they govern. Hormones are hybrid objects that cut across political and sexual economies; transgress distinctions between the organic and the inorganic, the biological and the social; and sit at the uncertain boundary between sex and gender. Hormones thus reveal the limits of the models that guide much of social analysis and its bias towards “skinned existents,” a phrase Elizabeth Povinelli uses to refer to the way that bio-ontological thinking entraps objects in membranes as it strives to maintain distinctions between Life and Nonlife.

Full text available here: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1498-endurance-and-alterability

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2017

This review discusses a growing body of scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and scien... more This review discusses a growing body of scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that examines how drugs are rendered efficacious in laboratories, therapeutic settings, and everyday lives. This literature foregrounds insights into how commercial interests and societal concerns shape the kinds of pharmaceutical effects that are actualized, and how some efficacies are blocked in response to moral concerns. The work brought together here reveals how regulatory institutions and health policy makers seek to stabilize pharmaceutical actions while, on the front lines of care, pharmacists, health workers and users tinker with dosages and indications to tailor pharmaceutical actions to specific circumstances. We show that there is no pure (pharmaceutical) object that precedes its socialization. Pharmaceuticals are not “discovered”; they are made and re-made in relation to shifting contexts. The review outlines five key areas of ethnographic and STS research that examines such fluid drugs.

Full text available: http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/tZrDypHKx5xfmj4wBJ8s/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041539

Background: A wide range of studies have demonstrated the potential efficacy of the psychoactive ... more Background: A wide range of studies have demonstrated the potential efficacy of the psychoactive Amazonian brew ayahuasca in addressing substance addiction, revealing that physiological and psychological mechanisms are deeply enmeshed. This article maps the way these dimensions come alive in interactive ritual contexts. Studies of psychedelic-assisted treatments for addiction have much to gain from an ethnographic analysis of people's experience of addiction healing in the particular ecologies of use and care where these interventions are rendered efficacious.
Methods: This is an ethnographically-grounded, qualitative analysis of experiences of addiction recovery within ayahuasca rituals. It draws on long-term fieldwork and participant observation with ayahuasca communities and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with participants with substance abuse histories.
Results: Ayahuasca's efficacy in the treatment of addiction blends somatic, symbolic and collective dimensions. The layering of these effects and the direction given to them in ritual circumscribes the experience and provides tools to render it meaningful. Existent modes of evaluation are ill-suited to account for the particular materialsemiotic efficacy of complex interventions such as ayahuasca healing for addiction. The article argues that practices of care characteristic of the ritual spaces in which ayahuasca is collectively consumed play a key therapeutic role.
Conclusions: The ritual use of ayahuasca can provide a much needed heterotopia to hegemonic understandings of addiction, paving new ground between the overstated difference between community and pharmacological interventions. The article concludes that fluid, adaptable forms of caregiving play a key role in the success of addiction recovery and that feeling part of a community has an important therapeutic potential.

This policy brief has been developed in response to the increasing awareness among policy-makers ... more This policy brief has been developed in response to the increasing awareness among policy-makers and the public health community
of the important relationship between culture and health. By exploring the three key public health areas of nutrition, migration
and environment, the policy brief demonstrates how cultural awareness is central to understanding health and well-being and to
developing more effective and equitable health policies. Consequently, it argues that public health policy-making has much to gain
from applying research from the health-related humanities and social sciences.

forthcoming (2016) in Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 35(4) P... more forthcoming (2016) in Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 35(4)

Please email if you would like a PDF version

American Anthropologist, 2023

BioSocieties (Special Issue), Jun 2015

Vibrant - Virtual Brazilian Anthropology Journal , 2025

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2024

American Anthropologist , 2023

Future—that is to be, relating to, or constituting a tense expressive of time yet to come.

PhytoFutures—speculative gestures of bringing forth, growing, and multiplying that-which-is-to-be-with-plants through collective
imaginative practices.

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality, 2023

Ilha - Revista de Antropologia , 2023

American Ethnologist , 2020

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, 2021

BioSocieties , 2021

Cultural Anthropology , 2018

Full text available here: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1498-endurance-and-alterability

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2017

Full text available: http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/tZrDypHKx5xfmj4wBJ8s/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041539

forthcoming (2016) in Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 35(4) P... more forthcoming (2016) in Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 35(4)

Please email if you would like a PDF version

This article examines what is said to be un/known about obesity and the way attributions of knowl... more This article examines what is said to be un/known about obesity and the way attributions of knowledge or ignorance circulate within the field of public health nutrition. The risks caused by individual behaviors have been an overstated concern in public health. Obesity, like many of today’s complex problems, is determined by myriad nested interactions spanning the political economies of market regulation, modes of agricultural production, the biochemistry of appetite regulation, or changing family structures. Yet public intervention – and the science produced to validate it – remains wedded to a mode of intervening in complex problems which has limited purchase over the complexity it contends with. The article draws on work on the social construction of ignorance to argue that the field of evidence in obesity science is fashioned in a way that deflects attention (and responsibility) away from questions of food production and marketing and continues to frame the problem as one of individual responsibility. Rather than discrediting the veracity of the evidence produced out of industry-research partnerships which increasingly dominate the field of public health research, this article examines how the field of evidence has been structured by these relations. It argues that demonstrating causal relations between the political and socioeconomic determinants of malnutrition and measurable health indexes is largely compromised not simply by the absence of good evidence but because the existing parameters of “good” science as they are currently defined cannot straightforwardly reveal such relations. This is because the configuration of the knowable is increasingly redefined in terms of whether knowledge is operationalizable.

The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology edited by Lenore Manderson, Anita Hardon and Elizabeth Cartwright

https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138015630 The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology... more https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138015630

The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology provides a contemporary overview of the key themes in medical anthropology. In this exciting departure from conventional handbooks, compendia and encyclopedias, the three editors have written the core chapters of the volume, and in so doing, invite the reader to reflect on the ethnographic richness and theoretical contributions of research on the clinic and the field, bioscience and medical research, infectious and non-communicable diseases, biomedicine, complementary and alternative modalities, structural violence and vulnerability, gender and ageing, reproduction and sexuality. As a way of illustrating the themes, a rich variety of case studies are included, presented by over 60 authors from around the world, reflecting the diverse cultural contexts in which people experience health, illness, and healing. Each chapter and its case studies are introduced by a photograph, reflecting medical and visual anthropological responses to inequality and vulnerability. An indispensible reference in this fastest growing area of anthropological study, The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology is a unique and innovative contribution to the field.

Resumo: Este estudo explora as margens da medicina, em que práticas de saúde e aprimoramento se c... more Resumo: Este estudo explora as margens da medicina, em que práticas de saúde e aprimoramento se confundem. Ele é baseado no trabalho de campo desenvolvido no contexto de dois projetos de pesquisa distintos no Brasil sobre cirurgia plástica e terapias de hormônio sexual. Há uma significativa sobreposição clínica dessas duas terapias. Ambas estão disponíveis nos sistemas de saúde público e privado de tal forma que revelam a dinâmica de classes subjacente à medicina brasileira. Essas terapias também têm uma dimensão experimental enraizada no contexto normativo do Brasil e nas expectativas da sociedade em relação à medicina como forma de controlar a saúde reprodutiva e sexual da mulher. O uso medicinal experimental desses tratamentos está associado a um uso experimental " social " : as mulheres os adotam em resposta a pressões, ansiedades e aspirações no âmbito profissional e na vida pessoal. Argumenta-se aqui que essas técnicas experimentais estão se tornando moralmente autorizadas como um controle rotineiro da saúde da mulher, integradas aos tratamentos predominantes de obstetrícia e ginecologia, e sutilmente confundidas com práticas de cuidados pessoais que são vistas no Brasil como essenciais para atingir uma forma de feminilidade moderna.

Palavras-chave: cirurgia plástica; terapias hormonais; Brasil; gênero e sexualidade; saúde reprodutiva.

BioSocieties Special Issue "Alimentary uncertainties: from contested evidence to policy ", edited by Emilia Sanabria & Emily Yates-Doerr, 2015

This article examines the way the category of “the sensorial” is mobilised across specific domain... more This article examines the way the category of “the sensorial” is mobilised across specific domains of obesity research, nutritional policies and care practices for overweight persons in France. It considers the way the “natural” body is understood to have developed mechanisms that motivate eaters to seek out energy-dense foods, a hardwiring which is maladaptive in today's plethoric food environment. The article analyses the feedback models mobilised in scientific literature on the neuroendocrine processes regulating appetite. The analysis of how “the sensorial” is studied (in scientific practices) and used to treat patients provides a vantage point into the ways the materialities of foods and bodies are understood to mutually transform each other. Recent findings show that fat cells have a memory and actively influence metabolism by secreting hormones, revealing that eaters are not the only active term, but that the choices they make are affected by the materiality of the foods they ingest. “The sensorial,” here, functions as a regulator in the complex feedback mechanisms where social norms regulating foodscapes or concerning appropriate meal frequency become enfolded in the molecular processes that control appetite regulation and shape the “biological” drives of eaters. This model of feedback is in turn put to work in the article to think about what happens when such knowledge flows from specific experimental contexts to care practices. It examines the way pleasure and the sensations of eaters are increasingly foregrounded in French nutritional health promotion strategies in a context where informing eaters is deemed ineffective. The article traces the work that the category of “the sensorial” does as it flows through the loops and feedbacks between scientific evidence, policy and care. It traces shifts in policy orientations as the sensory aspects of eating gradually take purchase over informational and cognitive approaches to health promotion.

Anthropology & Medicine 2014 21(2):202-16, 2014

This paper explores medical borderlands where health and enhancement practices are entangled. It ... more This paper explores medical borderlands where health and enhancement practices are entangled. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the context of two distinct research projects in Brazil on plastic surgery and sex hormone therapies. These two therapies have significant clinical overlap. Both are made available in private and public healthcare in ways that reveal the class dynamics underlying Brazilian medicine. They also have an important experimental dimension rooted in Brazil’s regulatory context and societal expectations placed on medicine as a means for managing women’s reproductive and sexual health. Off-label and experimental medical use of these treatments is linked to experimental social use: how women adopt them to respond to the pressures, anxieties and aspirations of work and intimate life. The paper argues that these experimental techniques are becoming morally authorized as routine management of women’s health, integrated into mainstream Ob-Gyn healthcare, and subtly blurred with practices of cuidar-se (self-care) seen in Brazil as essential for modern femininity.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly Volume 28, Issue 4, pages 537–555, Dec 2014

The contraceptive pill has given way to a multitude of products, in different packaging and modes... more The contraceptive pill has given way to a multitude of products, in different packaging and modes of administration. This article draws on work on the pharmaceutical copy, extending the analysis to the making of difference between forms of administration for contraceptive medicines as well as between brand-name drugs, generics and similares, as they are known in Brazil. It explores how Brazilian prescribers and users – within the divergent structural constraints afforded by private and public health – apprehend and negotiate distinctions between the drugs available to them. This ethnographic account of hormone-use reveals new fault-lines through which the pharmakon exerts it influence. The attention industry places on pharmacodynamics as it produces new products from similar compounds suggests that pharmaceutical effects are at once symbolic and experienced in the flesh. The article concludes with a reflection on the future of the generic form in a field increasingly crowded by branded copies.

IFRIS International Conference - Troubles in Transition - Nov 2024, 2024

This talk examines the operations of what Trouillot (1991) named the “Savage slot” in science. In... more This talk examines the operations of what Trouillot (1991) named the “Savage slot” in science. Indigenous efforts to break out of the “Savage Slot” (to which they are continuously re-allocated) threatens a foundational narrative of Western science. This is that the West has rational, experimentally validated facts and “they” have beliefs and traditions. Unsettling the dichotomy between Indigenous and Western sciences is often caught in double-bind: it requires contrasting the two to make the point, thereby reanimating the distinction it is trying to dismantle. This talk will suggest that the reiteration of the idea of radical incommensurability between these knowledge systems might at times serve to circumvent the difficult labour of creating Otherwise modes of engagement between Western and Indigenous Sciences. Drawing on a series of ethnographic vignettes of working alongside Indigenous colleagues in the psychedelic science renaissance, the talk maps how Indigenous ways of knowing about healing are strategically (and oftentimes partially) appropriated while Indigenous past contributions to the field are erased. Against the focus on human brains and cognition that predominate in psychedelic science, Indigenous experts locate knowledge in territories and remind Westerners that other beings may also be thinking with us.

Challenges and Aftermaths of the Scalar: Microbes, Plants & Pollutants - International Symposium (19-21 June) , 2024

In this talk, I propose to think of ayahuasca as a peculiar kind of “inter-scalar vehicle” (Hecht... more In this talk, I propose to think of ayahuasca as a peculiar kind of “inter-scalar vehicle” (Hecht 2018) to help us think through anthropology’s problem with scale. The first scalar challenge I address concerns mapping what happens when Ayahuasca is set into circulation, as it moves out of Amazonia, so to speak. What kind of a scalar displacement was, and does this continue to be? What does thinking this as a trans-scalar (vs. a spatial) phenomena change to the analysis? What of ayahuasca travels between these sites? The second relates to analysis as a form of scaling that links link phenomena across scales, linking parts (such as individuals) to wholes (such as societies). Strathern’s deployed the notion of a merographic connection to unwrite the tacit part-whole grammars that make otherwise ways of worlding so difficult to represent. In this talk, I focus on three aspects of what for now I’ll call Capitalocenic-scaling: its appropriation and/or erasure of difference, its [Western]-Human-centeredness and its colonial-expansionist-frontiering dynamics. This talk is a first attempt to think about otherwise ways of scaling that are encountering – via the circulation of ayahuasca –Capitalocenic-scaling. Could thinking through the way myriad collectives “do” scaling differently help us revisit older anthropological debates on comparison, multi-sited ethnographic research and the radical incommensurability of the ontological turn? Because ayahuasca so explicitly ruptures the frames of habitual perception it problematises any reference we can make to a (singular) anthropocentric “native scale.” In sum I am trying to set up a dialogue between STS work on scaling and anthropological work on ways of relating beyond the human that could also be thought of as scalar – but otherwise. To examine this tension between Capitalocenic-scaling and Otherwise-scaling I turn to the foundationally scalar practice of “holding space” for ayahuasca.

4S Society for the Social Studies of Science annual conference, 2021

This paper asks how space can be held for healing within the diseased landscapes of colonialism. ... more This paper asks how space can be held for healing within the diseased landscapes of colonialism. What does it mean to heal individuals when the territories in which they dwell – and from which they nourish themselves – are violently extracted, saturated in toxicity and unhospitable to regenerative forms of sociality? Drawing on ethnographic work on ayahuasca ritual practices circulating within Brazil (Acre, Bahia, Sao Paulo) and between Brazil and Europe, the paper explores and expands the idiom of “holding space” for ceremonial healing work in relation to the territorial dimensions of colonial and racial violence. I attend to the prosaic logistical challenges faced by what I tentatively call “ayahuasca ceremonial infrastructures” to carve out healing spaces within neocolonial territorial orders. STS work on the placebo, pharmaceuticals, and drugs (in particular psychedelics), analyses the intra-actions between substances and their “settings” in producing efficacies. This paper explores lines of flight between “setting” and “settler” colonial projects by attending to the ways settler colonial settings are, to a greater or lesser degree, contested or countered by ayahuasca ceremonial infrastructures. This will allow me to examine different ayahuasca ceremonial formations from the perspective of how they resist colonialisms and to ask about the durability of the counter-settings they manifest. As the global demand for ayahuasca booms, one way to track this is to examine how tightly or loosely the assemblage of community-territory-plants is held and how, as it is expanded, new ways of maintaining good relations, beyond the human, are imagined and realized.

Plantas Sagradas en las Americas II, 2021

Calls to decolonize the University, Disciplines (such as anthropology) or (Western) Theory have b... more Calls to decolonize the University, Disciplines (such as anthropology) or (Western) Theory have boomed in recent years. While this is a positive step-drawing awareness to ongoing colonial violence and its roots in Western institutions and knowledge practices-decolonial thinkers warn that "decolonization is not a metaphor" (Tuck & Yang 2012). Indeed, the metaphorization of decolonization runs the risk of rescuing "settler futurity," which is to say that there can be no decolonial theory without a decolonial practice (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010). What can reciprocity-beyond tokenizationmean in this context? In this talk I explore some of the challenges of undoing the pernicious coloniality of knowledge (Quijano 1997) from within the academy. Drawing on insights generated in a collaborative multi-sited ethnographic project on the global circulation of ayahuasca healing practices (in the "Forest," "City" and "Lab") I reflect on the politics of bridging knowledges. I first examine some incommensurabilities between social science and biomedical practices of evidence, particularly as they are leveraged in public health policy-making and argue that we need to move from being interdisciplinary to being undisciplined. In the wake of the COVID pandemic, "conspirituality" (Ward & Voas 2011) has reached new heights among (white) alternative healing and ecologically-minded circles, leading us to ask afresh what practices of science-after epistemicide-are needed to foster social justice and regeneration. Thinking and working alongside our Shipibo and Huni Kuin Indigenous collaborators, our team has sought to tackle the colonialism inherent within the administrative and ethical apparatus of the University in order to construct inquiries collaboratively and honour the integrity of Indigenous knowledges. This has led us to foreground the question of imagining otherwise (Dillon 2012, Gumbs 2020, Povinelli 2016) and develop methodologies to hold space for encounters that potentiate transformation.

Open Source Body Conference , 2021

This intervention asks how space can be held for healing within the diseased landscapes of coloni... more This intervention asks how space can be held for healing within the diseased landscapes of colonialism. What does it mean to heal individuals when the territories in which they dwell – and from which they nourish themselves – are violently extracted, saturated in toxicity and unhospitable to regenerative forms of sociality? Drawing on ethnographic work on ayahuasca ritual practices the paper explores and expands the idiom of “holding space” for ceremonial healing work in relation to the territorial dimensions of colonial and racial violence. Emila Sanabria attends to lines of flight between “setting” and “settler” colonial projects by attending to the ways the assemblage of community-territory-plants is held, and ask how maintaining good relations, beyond the human, is imagined and realized.

https://www.cienciapsicodelica.com.br, 2021

Para a antropóloga Emilia Sanabria, qualquer projeto científico que envolva as chamadas plantas s... more Para a antropóloga Emilia Sanabria, qualquer projeto científico que envolva as chamadas plantas sagradas, como a ayahuasca, deve incluir uma discussão sobre o nosso passado extrativista e colonial. “É o que nos lembra sem cansar nossos colaboradores indígenas. E me parece muito importante atender a essa demanda, começando toda discussão a partir de um reconhecimento desse fato histórico, porque isso muda o ponto de partida”, disse a pesquisadora franco-colombiana do CNRS (Centro Nacional de Pesquisa Científica), em Paris.

A fala marcou a primeira edição, em março, dos “Encontros Psicodélicos: Conversas interdisciplinares sobre ayahuasca e outros psicoativos", cooperação mensal entre o portal Ciência Psicodélica (CP), o projeto Healing Encounters, do CNRS, e o Grupo de Pesquisa ICARO (Cooperação Interdisciplinar para Pesquisa e Divulgação da Ayahuasca), da Unicamp, com apoio do Instituto Chacruna.

No evento, que contou ainda com a participação do psiquiatra da Unicamp Luís Fernando Tófoli, responsável pelo ICARO, os pesquisadores discutiram, entre outros temas, sobre como reconhecer essa herança colonizadora da ciência sem rejeitar a própria ciência.

“É importante reconhecer que existe uma eterna luta na busca por conhecimento dentro do modelo clássico de ciência", afirmou Tófoli. “A ciência não é feita de certezas, mas de dúvidas.” Para o psiquiatra, a ciência realizada com a ayahuasca é obrigatoriamente interdisciplinar. Isso porque, além da origem indígena tradicional, ele lembrou também que é necessário considerar as vivências pessoais do campo, a exemplo da tese de doutorado do psicofarmacologista Lucas Maia, integrante do CP e mediador do evento.

Reconhecendo a importância do Sistema Único de Saúde, da ciência pública e da universidade pública, Camis Benedito, que pesquisa a questão de gênero no campo da ayahuasca e integra o Healing Encounters e o ICARO, encerrou a conversa alertando para o sequestro da ciência psicodélica por projetos de cunho empresarial.

Bodies in Trouble Conference, Pact Zollverein , 2019

Plants come with their worlds. According to indigenous epistemologies, plants can be sentient be... more Plants come with their worlds. According to indigenous epistemologies, plants can be sentient beings, impart wisdom, have agency and intention. Various forms of care are extended to plants. They form part of kinship structures, and their genealogies may be entangled with those of the humans who domesticate and propagate them. Plant medicines like the psychoactive herbal brew Ayahuasca, used in collective rituals, remind us that encounters with others are essential to healing: encounters between patients and healers, encounters between humans and plants and colonial encounters. In her lecture, anthropologist Emilia Sanabria takes a look at the current global rise in Ayahuasca consumption and reflects on the importance of decolonizing our understandings of healing and of what (or who) plants are and do.

World Ayahuasca Conference , 2019

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with healers and ritual communities in Brazil who are ... more This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with healers and ritual communities in Brazil who are innovating new ritual practices around ayahuasca. These groups have boomed in urban Brazilian centers raising questions about the legitimacy of the myriad practices emerging on the fringe of formal instituted religious practice. Such spaces, while not strictly Western (when viewed from the USA or Europe), break deeply with the Amazonian ontologies that initially gave rise to the knowledge and practice of ritual ayahuasca use. They are profoundly hybrid, informed by a dense series of postcolonial reinscriptions, appropriations and transformations. The paper explores how the contingent, fragile yet potent efficacy of ayahuasca’s wildness is being enfolded into instituted legal and scientific forms. How is the Other of science made recognizable within its frame and what is at stake for both science and its other in this process? At stake here is a tension between a praxis of healing that is highly context-dependent and one in which knowledge of efficacy is abstracted and by necessity de-contextualised. At stake also, is the capacity of ayahuasca’s (like other traditional remedies brought into the purview of biomedicine) wildness to survive. Indeed many practitioners of ayahuasca healing state that what is interesting about ayahuasca is that it is alive. Drinking ayahuasca is opening to the sentience of another living being, a process often explained in terms of cultivating a relation with another consciousness. The paper asks what kinds of resilient instituting practices can sustain the translation of ayahuasca through its apparently ineluctable globalization, without killing it.

Paper presented at the World Ayahuasca Conference 2016, Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil

Ayahuasca is a highly plural thing. Traditional Amazonian herbal brews were gradually stabilized ... more Ayahuasca is a highly plural thing. Traditional Amazonian herbal brews were gradually stabilized in the 20th century as the mixture of Banisteriopsis and Psychotria. This transformation arose in the context of colonial and neo-traditional uses and in response to legal regimes. As the fluid assemblage continues its global expansion, lyophilized ayahuasca capsules may replace the ritual ingestion of the bitter brew. The complex circuits of ayahuasca’s efficacy are coming under clinical investigation, most notably for anxiety, PTSD and addiction treatment. The logic of the randomized controlled trial poses the acute problem of how to standardise both the substance and the context in which it is rendered efficacious. Entheogenic or psychedelic substances have unpredictable effects, forcing researchers to recognise that their efficacy cannot be reduced to their pharmacological properties (DeGrandpre). The rituals accompanying the use of these substances are basic to their effects, and shaped by what many refer to as “set” (subjective expectations of users) and “setting” (social and physical environment) of the drug experience. This paper explores what an anthropological perspective might bring to current debates regarding the relationship between these unique experiences and the diverse sociomaterial spaces within which they unfold. Based on fieldwork with ritual experts, clinicians and activists engaged in translating ayahuasca’s efficacies, it examines the reformulating (Gaudillière & Pordié) or instituting (Farquhar) of ayahuasca. It explores how the issues of dosage and the crafting of spaces for ayahuasca experiences exhaust the epistemological possibilities of controlled experiments, requiring new frames with which to understand efficacy.

Randomized-controlled trials have become the gold standard of evidence-making in biomedical resea... more Randomized-controlled trials have become the gold standard of evidence-making in biomedical research. But what do they test? How are their results made applicable beyond the test situation? These questions are tricky when the goal is to establish the efficacy of pharmaceutical interventions, but they become almost intractable when the objective is testing the effectiveness of complex interventions whose causal principles are multiply determined and highly local. This paper explores how the logic of the trial itself is tested by the recent renaissance of clinical trials to test the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances, for anxiety, PTSD or addiction treatment. It examines the circuits through which the effects of the traditional Amazonian herbal brew ayahuasca are translated to fit the categories of biomedicine, and its specific understandings of healing. What is lost and what is gained (and for whom) through the incorporation of ayahuasca into the trial logic? Entheogenic substances have notoriously unpredictable effects. The ritual setting in which these substances are used are basic to their effects, and shaped by what many refer to as “set” (subjective expectations of users) and “setting” (social and physical environment) of the drug experience. Many practitioners explain that ayahuasca does not treat symptoms but heals their causes. It strikes at the existential origins of suffering and dis-ease. This deeply challenges the routine practices of biomedical research which strive to demonstrate causal and generalizable links between an intervention and an outcome at the population level. What, then, can be tested of the ayahuasca experience?

Cordis , 2024

Indigenous leaders and traditional practitioners increasingly contest the medicalisation of ayahu... more Indigenous leaders and traditional practitioners increasingly contest the medicalisation of ayahuasca underway under the auspices of the psychedelic renaissance in mental health.

International Symposium, 2024

The question of scale is such an essential aspect of contemporary innovation practices and polici... more The question of scale is such an essential aspect of contemporary innovation practices and policies that it has given rise to a whole vocabulary to characterize engineering or industrial R&D, such as pilot, demonstrator, feasibility study, proof of concept, scaling-up, up-marketing, up-conversion, project review, critical path, etc. These processes are intimately linked to practices of standardization and found in most sectors, from pharmaceuticals to construction to agriculture, whether or not they call on the sciences and devices of the knowledge economy. Scaling-up is also – particularly since the 1980s – a characteristic and an objective of the construction of “the global,” be it the “global” as envisaged by economists in their models of growth, production, widening of markets or the intensification of commodity circulation; the “global” as envisaged by managers and public policy actors as they roll-out performance indicators and metrics, bench-marking and comparative trials; or the “global” as envisaged by experts of the “planetary,” with their procession of scenarios, models, preparedness plans, transition measures and reproducible experiments.
As the cascading deleterious effects of progress, the adverse effects of technologies and the intensification of ecological crises have become more apparent, the scalar has become a source of problems. Good governance has increasingly come to be (also) defined by principles of degrowth, reduced consumption (of resources and goods), re-localization and downscaling.
From studies of the production of norms and standards to more recent analyses of modelling and scenarios, Science and Technology Studies (STS) has addressed many aspects of the relationship between scale and knowledge, innovation processes, production and use practices and their stakes and consequences. This body of work has documented how scalarization is not just a question of quantity or accumulation, but is the expression of aspirations, embodied in policies that are rife with contradictions.
We begin from the recognition of the inescapable nature of the scalar in contemporary governance and knowledge practices and of the limits of calls for relocalization as a starting point for analyzing both the damages and the challenges of scaling. We trace three registers, articulations and problematizations of the scalar through specific configurations of action involving microbes, plants and pollutants across scales. The first concerns the modes of knowledge and epistemic frameworks of scale ascensions in their relations to reductionism (while not presuming that reduction automatically implies reification). The second concerns the materialities and unthought-of and/or invisiblized destructive dynamics of production and valuation (of which plantations and Taylorism are well-known historical configurations). The third concerns the institutions and mechanisms of governance that are essential to scaling-up and down-scaling, whether in terms of (intellectual) property, the organization of work, technical standards or biopolitics.

4S / ECOSITE , 2022

This panel invited empirically-based presentations that explore otherwise ways of making knowledg... more This panel invited empirically-based presentations that explore otherwise ways of making knowledge together, examining how care, good relations and transformative justice can be cultivated within interdisciplinary, transnational or intercultural knowledge encounters. It recognizes that Western technoscience plays a key role in epistemicides and the deepening of global inequalities whilst simultaneously refusing to give practices of knowing in common up. It asks: how can space be held for renewed ways of relating in difference? What strategies, modes of collective attention, spatial or interpersonal arrangements productively disrupt racist, sexist, and otherwise hierarchical knowledge production assemblages and settings? What are the costs or risks of entering into encounter for the different parties involved? How can these be better redistributed? We aim to learn together by gathering experiments in encountering that begin by recognizing legacies of erasure and oppression as they seek to reconfigure modes of knowing in common. We are interested in learning from "failures", dead-ends or changes of direction that collaborative ventures were allowed to take in the ever intensifying neoliberalization of University knowledge production, as well as learning about who was (or not) allowed to fail. We particularly welcome contributions that critically engage with scientific practices that purport to "validate" Indigenous or traditional knowledges, contributions that explore spaces of encounter between art and science, or ones that actively recognize and engage more-than-human presences. Submissions in Spanish, Portuguese & English are welcome, as are those that trouble and experiment with the format of the conference paper.

Cultural Anthropology (Hot Spots), 2020

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/psychedelics-beyond-the-neuro

Habilitation à diriger des recherches , 2019

Qu’est ce qu’un corps ? Comment la guérison est elle pratiquée, reçue et évaluée ? Partant d’une ... more Qu’est ce qu’un corps ? Comment la guérison est elle pratiquée, reçue et évaluée ? Partant d’une analyse du parcours des hormones sexuelles – objets hybrides et complexes – dans les pratiques cliniques et les récits sur le corps, les travaux qui composent cette Habilitation ont ouvert une série de questions concernant le corps, ses délimitations, et la relation entre les techniques d’auto-perfectionnement, de contrôle ou d’hygiène et le projet de modernité Brésilien. Ils retracent un intérêt pour les médicaments comme objets matériels et discursifs mettant à jour l’imbrication des domaines pharmacologiques, corporels et politiques. Ancrés à la croisée de l’anthropologie sociale, l’anthropologie médicale et les Science and Technology Studies (STS), les travaux rassemblés ici ont abordé la question de la plasticité des corps et de leurs substances, les biopolitiques, les enjeux d’échelles et les politiques des (non)-savoirs, les régimes de preuve en santé publique, dans les champs de la santé sexuelle, nutritionnelle et santé mentale. Ils ont aboutit à des recherches en cours sur l’expansion frappante et les réinventions prolifiques de pratiques de guérison qui font usage d’un breuvage amazonien connu sous le nom d’ayahuasca, objet du Vol. 3. Celui-ci examine les frictions et échanges entre les formes néo-traditionnelles de guérison en contextes urbains, la réémergence des substances psychédéliques en psychiatrie et les reconfigurations contemporaines que cela induit pour les pratiques shamaniques en Amazonie. L’analyse comparative est structurée autour de trois objectifs qui sont de cartographier l’entrelacement des effets biologiques et symboliques de la guérison ; d’étudier les rencontres avec des êtres-plus-qu’humains dans les pratiques de guérison et d’analyser les conditions de possibilité de la coexistence d’ontologies multiples au sein d’un monde commun.

http://blog.castac.org/2018/01/bodily-plasticity/

Colloque Pharmakôn organisé dans le cadre de l’exposition « Venenum. Un monde empoisonné » par le... more Colloque Pharmakôn organisé dans le cadre de l’exposition « Venenum. Un monde empoisonné » par le Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Enjeux Contemporains (FRE 2002, CNRS-Université Lyon 2-ENS Lyon), en partenariat avec le Musée des Confluences et l’ERC Advanced Grant Chemical Youth.

Organisé par Julien Bondaz (LADEC-Université Lyon 2), Michèle Cros (LADEC-Université Lyon 2), Maxime Michaud (Centre de Recherche de l’Institut Paul Bocuse) et Emilia Sanabria (LADEC-ENS Lyon).

https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/shed-walls-dont-build-them One set of signs from the ... more https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/shed-walls-dont-build-them One set of signs from the Women's March following Trump's inauguration caught my attention. It read "Shed walls, don't build them" over the drawing of a womb. Shedding walls, here, means menstruating (least the point needs to be spelt out).

The framing of health as a global issue over the last three decades has carved out an intellectua... more The framing of health as a global issue over the last three decades has carved out an intellectual, economic and political space that differs from that of the post-war international public health field. This older system was characterised by disease eradication programs and by the dominance of nation states and the organisations of the United Nations. The actors, intervention targets and tools of contemporary global health contrast with previous international health efforts. The construction of markets for medical goods takes a central place in this new era, as does regulation by civil society actors. Global health can also be characterized by co-morbidities between chronic and infectious diseases, the stress on therapeutic intervention, risk management, health as an instrument of 'community' development and the deployment of new modes of surveillance and epidemiological prediction. This emerging field takes on a radically different appearance when examined at the level of its infrastructures (such as the WHO, the World Bank or the Gates Foundation) or at the level of the knowledges and anticipatory practices generated by its practices and local instantiations.
This seminar will combine historical, sociological and anthropological approaches to examine this globalized space and the assemblages that constitute it: public-private partnerships, foundations, local 'communities', cancers, 'non-communicable diseases', risk prevention, monitoring and evaluation, etc. Particular attention will be given to the infrastructures and the contemporary dynamics of knowledge production, insurance techniques and diagnostic interventions, therapeutic 'innovations' in their diverse geographies, including Africa, Asia or Latin America. These often differ widely from transfer schemes between the global north and the global south that insist on technological dependency. The seminar will examine the myriad local forms that global health takes in everyday practices.

All welcome! EHESS, salle 015, RdC, bât. Le France, 190-198 av de France 75013 Paris - France M... more All welcome!

EHESS, salle 015, RdC, bât. Le France, 190-198 av de France 75013 Paris - France
Monthly session, every 2nd Tuesday (except in Oct., on Thursday 15th and Nov., on Tuesday 17th), 2 pm-5 pm

The framing of health as a global issue over the last three decades has carved out an intellectual, economic and political space that differs from that of the post-war international public health field. This older system was characterised by disease eradication programs and by the dominance of nation states and the organisations of the United Nations. The actors, intervention targets and tools of contemporary global health contrast with previous international health efforts. The construction of markets for medical goods takes a central place in this new era, as does regulation by civil society actors. Global health can also be characterized by co-morbidities between chronic and infectious diseases, the stress on therapeutic intervention, risk management, health as an instrument of 'community' development and the deployment of new modes of surveillance and epidemiological prediction. This emerging field takes on a radically different appearance when examined at the level of its infrastructures (such as the WHO, the World Bank or the Gates Foundation) or at the level of the knowledges and anticipatory practices generated by its practices and local instantiations.
This seminar will combine historical, sociological and anthropological approaches to examine this globalized space and the assemblages that constitute it: public-private partnerships, foundations, local 'communities', cancers, 'non-communicable diseases', risk prevention, monitoring and evaluation, etc. Particular attention will be given to the infrastructures and the contemporary dynamics of knowledge production, insurance techniques and diagnostic interventions, therapeutic 'innovations' in their diverse geographies, including Africa, Asia or Latin America. These often differ widely from transfer schemes between the global north and the global south that insist on technological dependency. The seminar will examine the myriad local forms that global health takes in everyday practices.

This panel invites ethnographic accounts of the way il/licit drugs are made to do things in labor... more This panel invites ethnographic accounts of the way il/licit drugs are made to do things in laboratories, therapeutic settings, drug outlets and everyday lives across regulatory settings in the Global North and South. It takes as point of departure that pharmaceutical objects do not produce universal biological effects as clinical researchers and drug regulators often assume, but that effects emerge in “a living labyrinth whose topology varies in time, where partial and circumstantial causalities are so intertwined that they often escape any a priori intelligibility” (Stengers 1996). How can we understand drug efficacy if, after Ingold, we conceptualize pharmaceuticals as “gatherings of materials in motion”? Conceptualizing pharmaceuticals as fluid rather than as bounded objects is productive because they are inherently evanescent and designed to be absorbed into bodies. The ways in which this process is locally understood and experienced is variable and influenced by marketing strategies that link desirable images and affects to drugs. While clinical trials and global regulatory mechanisms aim to stabilize the bounded contours of pharmaceutical things we suggest that this process is highly unstable. This is made evident when pharmaceuticals travel, and are used offlabel for diverse nonapproved indications as ethnographies of global pharmaceutical flows have eloquently shown. Such uses inspire their continuous reinvention. The changing moralities at work in local settings can either promote new uses for medicinal substances (such as marijuana as pain medication) or impede the use of others that have, rightly or wrongly, acquired negative popular representations (such as the use of prostagalins as abortifacients or LSD as treatment for addiction). Barry (2005), after Stengers, referred to this process of crafting new pharmaceutical properties or effects for drugs as making “informed material.” We invite casestudies of fluid drugs which examine the work of making drugs work across a range of scales: from informing chemical materials in trials to rendering drug effects locally meaningful in changing regulatory and experiential settings.

Journée d'étude du pôle Politiques & santé, UMR Triangle L’épidémie d’Ebola sévit en Afrique ... more Journée d'étude du pôle Politiques & santé, UMR Triangle

L’épidémie d’Ebola sévit en Afrique de l’Ouest depuis un peu moins d’un an. Elle nous donne à voir, ou à revoir, ce que peut l’urgence et ce qu’elle occulte… Dans un premier temps, les réactions de certains pays face à l’épidémie (comme la Guinée) ou d’institutions internationales comme l’OMS ont été jugées tardives (Houssin 2014). Ainsi, l’OMS à la tête de l’International Health Regulations (IHR) n’a déclaré Ebola un enjeu d’urgence de santé publique internationale (PHEIC, public health emergencies of international concern) que 5 mois après son début, soit le 8 août 2014. Mais début septembre 2014, face à la non-réactivité des acteurs internationaux, MSF en appelle à une intervention militaire pour répondre aux enjeux de l’épidémie (Gostin & Friedman 2014).

Force est de constater que depuis septembre 2014, une véritable « Ebolindustrie » s’est mise en place. D’abord orchestrée par MSF, organisation devenue experte en prise en charge des épidémies de fièvres hémorragiques depuis les premières épidémies en Afrique Centrale, le dispositif de réponse (qu’il soit médical, qu’il relève de la surveillance épidémiologique, de la prévention ou encore de la recherche) est à présent entre les mains d’une multiplicité d’acteurs qui se sont engagés sur le terrain d’Ebola en urgence et/ou au nom de l’urgence. Parmi ces acteurs, même l’OMS n’est pas en reste (Horton 2014), ni l’ONU qui crée en septembre 2014, l’UNMEER (Mission des Nations Unies pour la lutte contre Ebola / UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response). Intervenant cinq mois après le début de l’épidémie, la création de cette mission s’est faite finalement assez vite, pour mémoire, il a fallu attendre près de 10 ans entre la découverte du virus du sida (1984) et la création d’une agence dédiée de l’ONU (création de l’ONUSIDA en 1995) !
Le secteur de la recherche n’est pas en reste dans la mobilisation du registre de l’urgence en témoigne la rapidité avec laquelle la France, via l’INSERM et ses partenaires, a pu rédigé, faire financer par l’Europe et obtenir ses premiers résultats en l’espace de 5 mois… La même rapidité caractérise la mise en place des essais vaccinaux en Guinée. Il apparaît finalement pertinent d’appliquer à ces différents acteurs, le slogan de l’Etablissement de Préparation et de Réponse aux Urgences Sanitaires (EPRUS, dispositif du gouvernement français de réponse aux catastrophes sanitaires) : « Avec Eprus, prenons l’urgence de vitesse. »

Le 30 septembre 2014, le CDC estimait qu’en cas d’une politique de lutte inchangée contre l’épidémie, le nombre de cas de patients infectés par le virus Ebola serait d’environ 1.4 millions en janvier 2015. La réponse massive à l’urgence ainsi mise en scène aura fait mentir le CDC et le nombre de décès s’élève en février 2015 à 9150.
Dans ce récit, la pertinence de la réponse à l’épidémie Ebola ne semble tenir que dans sa capacité à s’inscrire dans l’urgence. Dans cette journée nous souhaitons dépasser la rhétorique de l’urgence et l’interroger à partir de trois entrées : les ressorts de l’urgence (au nom de quoi y-a-t’il urgence), ce qu’elle fabrique (quels dispositifs et quels aménagement avec la pratique ordinaire sont possibles au nom de l’urgence), ce qu’elle occulte (qu’est-ce que la rhétorique de l’urgence masque des enjeux politiques et moraux qui sous-tendent ce sur quoi elle intervient). Nous souhaitons favoriser une discussion autour de ces trois questions à partir d’entrées empiriques dont la liste n’est ici pas limitative.

Sciences & Urgences : l’épidémie Ebola a donné lieu à la mobilisation importante d’équipes de recherches cliniques et/ou de sciences sociales. Celles-ci se sont mobilisées en fonction d’une expérience acquise généralement dans le temps long de la recherche. Comment ont-elles négociés cette expérience dans l’urgence : quels conséquences sur la pratique de la recherche, sur la construction des protocole mais aussi comment la science redéfinit-elle les contours de l’urgence ? On pense notamment aux enjeux éthiques relatifs aux essais de nouvelles molécules ou aux essais vaccinaux.
Soins & Urgences : La question de la qualité des soins dans les centres de traitement Ebola a fait l’objet de critiques sévères au sein même d’organisations comme MSF. L’organisation ayant été critiqué pour avoir privilégié la sécurité des soignants au détriment des soins prodigués aux patients. Comment s’appliquent les principes de précaution en urgence et que permet cette articulation ?
Répondre à l’urgence s’impose comme un impératif moral. Pourtant la rapidité de la réponse à l’urgence relève d’une expérience (et pas seulement une expérience d’Ebola). Sous couvert de l’urgence, de nombreux acteurs se sont engagés en réinvestissant leur savoir-faire (HIV AIDS, SRAS, H1N1). L’urgence peut aussi se penser comme préparation.

A partir de cette discussion sur l’urgence fondée sur l’expérience Ebola, l’objectif est de comprendre mieux non pas seulement l’urgence comme relevant d’une économie morale contemporaine ou comme une rhétorique de la crise justifiant l’exception mais de l’interroger dans son rapport avec la science dans un contexte postcolonial et de santé globale.

The framing of health as a global issue over the last three decades has carved out an intellectua... more The framing of health as a global issue over the last three decades has carved out an intellectual, economic and political space that differs from that of the post-war international public health field. This older system was characterised by disease eradication programs and by the dominance of nation states and the organisations of the United Nations. The actors, intervention targets and tools of contemporary global health contrast with previous international health efforts. The construction of markets for medical goods takes a central place in this new era, as does regulation by civil society actors. Global health can also be characterized by co-morbidities between chronic and infectious diseases, the stress on therapeutic intervention, risk management, health as an instrument of 'community' development and the deployment of new modes of surveillance and epidemiological prediction. This emerging field takes on a radically different appearance when examined at the level of its infrastructures (such as the WHO, the World Bank or the Gates Foundation) or at the level of the knowledges and anticipatory practices generated by its practices and local instantiations.
This seminar will combine historical, sociological and anthropological approaches to examine this globalized space and the assemblages that constitute it: new actors, targets and tools such as public- private partnerships, foundations, local communities, cancers, non- communicable diseases, risk prevention, monitoring and evaluation, etc. Particular attention will be given to the infrastructures and the contemporary dynamics of knowledge production, insurance techniques and diagnostic interventions, therapeutic 'innovations' in their diverse geographies, including Africa, Asia or Latin America. These often differ widely from transfer schemes between the global north and the global south that insist on technological dependency. The seminar will examine the myriad local forms that global health takes in everyday practices from epidemiological forecasting, to research, care, policy-making and the possible futures they anticipate.

Organized by Claire Beaudevin (CNRS-Cermes3), Jean-Paul Gaudillière (Inserm-Cermes3), Frédéric Keck (CNRS-LAS/Musée du Quai Branly), Guillaume Lachenal (Université Paris Diderot-IUF), Céline Lefève (Université Paris Diderot - Centre Georges Canguilhem), Vinh- Kim Nguyen (Collège d'études mondiales), Laurent Pordié (CNRS-Cermes3), Émilia Sanabria (Inserm-École Normale Supérieure de Lyon).

Medical anthropologists examine health inequalities, pharmaceutical developments, public health p... more Medical anthropologists examine health inequalities, pharmaceutical developments, public health policies, interventions on populations. They have placed the body in context and decentered biomedical notions of health and illness as they have revealed changing definition of old age and death or the patenting of life. These developments index a transforming relationship between humanity and health, one made visible in the relationship between subjectivity, misfortune –embodied or not – and the forms of political engagement these incite. This research, sensitive to how life is not at the heart of our ways of thinking and doing politics, remains haunted by Foucault’s works on biopower and, increasingly, the care of the self. Science and technology studies (STS) has shown how scientific production creates new standards and values, how such works fans out through complex networks, each time redefining the world in which we live.
STS research on biomedicine has grown, but often isolated from conversations and debates in the anthropology of health and medical anthropology. Critics of STS accuse this field of inadequate fieldwork and a heavy-handed approach to forcing data to fit pre-established theoretical framework, while critics of medical anthropology complain that rich accounts of local illness knowledge and practice are too often opposed to a monolithic and “black-boxed” version of biomedicine. Yet can we do without a real exchange between these two disciplines? While the paradigm of evidence-based medicine seems to enjoy unquestioned legitimacy today, everyone agrees that this legitimacy is the byproduct of ongoing work engaging life sciences experts, health specialists and of the mobilization of social and political dynamics. Thus evidence-based medicine is the result of an effort which, although taking the appearance of evidence, is the result of a process aiming at building its own legitimacy. Based on processes rather than given facts, evidence-based medicine is at the heart of the debate we hope to develop during this meeting. The primary objective of this conference is to open, or rather to broaden, the space for exchanges between anthropology of health and science studies around evidence based-medicine: what are its contributions, its limitations, but also its constraints? How does it produce, impose or recompose within its everyday activities norms and standards of care? How does it redefine our conceptions of health, body and ailments afflicting us? How does it change our system of values? How does it influence the politics defining policies implemented within our health systems? The panels are structured around three sets of issues: 1) Making evidence, 2) Making bodies comparable & 3) Standardizing practices, practicing standards

Workshop report and introduction to the medical anthropology group at ENS-Lyon

Incorporated health behaviors: how to change an involuntary process?