Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper moves beyond analytical frames like medical pluralism by showing how medical industries in Madagascar furnish the raw materials for the construction and reconstruction of everyday life. It argues for decentering the consumption of therapeutic commodities as major objects of analysis.

Paper long abstract

In Fianarantsoa region of southern-central Madagascar, a pharmaceutical factory produces necessary antimalarial ingredients from the leaves of the Artemisia annua bush. But much is left behind in the villages where these medicinal plants are grown – like artemisia’s dried stems, which remain heaped up behind local houses once the valuable leaves are beaten off and sold to the drug company. This paper follows what that waste wood becomes: a woven fence protecting a village garden, struts for a new roof after cyclone damage, firewood for daily pots of rice and greens. In showing how medical industries furnish the raw materials for the fabric of everyday life in zones of production, it argues for ethnographic-historical methods that decenter consumption of therapeutic commodities as core objects of analysis. Nuanced methodological attention to medicine’s enmeshment with unfolding ordinariness – to how making medicine is in some ways also always making and remaking banal inhabited landscapes – in turn enables new theorizations of the relationship between biomedicine and ‘the normal.’ Dominant conceptual toolkits focus on the ways that modern biomedicine expands modes of being deemed pathological and shrinks modes of being deemed normal; this system’s intersections with other ways of practicing health constitute the grounds for analyses of medical pluralism. But medicinal-wood fences, roofs, and fires from Madagascar instead suggest the many ways that medical industries open unexpected potentials for the construction and reconstruction of ordinary life.