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Members

  • Vincanne Adams
    Vincanne Adams
    Vincanne Adams, PhD, is Professor and Vice-Chair in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, and Director of the Graduate Program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco. She has written extensively on Asian Medicines in Nepal and Tibet, including co-authoring the edited volume Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds (Berghahn, 2011), as well as numerous other books and articles. She is the recipient of the Basham Medal. Her new research is on global contemplative sciences in relation to Tibetan Medicine.

    Contact: AdamsV(at)dahsm.ucsf.edu
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  • Madhulika Banerjee
    Madhulika Banerjee
    Madhulika Banerjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Delhi. Her research interests include public policy, the politics of knowledge, traditional knowledge in contemporary developing societies, and comparative politics. She is the author of various works on the Indian pharmaceutical industry (Economic & Politcial Weekly, Contributions to Indian Sociology), including the book Power, Knowledge, Medicine: Ayurvedic Pharmaceuticals at Home and in the World (Orient Blackswan, 2009).

    Contact: madhulika.banerjee(at)gmail.com
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  • Calum Blaikie
    Calum Blaikie
    Calum Blaikie (PhD Kent) is an ERC-funded researcher with the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cermes3 in Paris, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). Calum works at the interface of medical, pharmaceutical, economic and environmental anthropology, primary focusing on Sowa Rigpa (or Tibetan medicine) in Himalayan India. His main fields of interest include therapeutic economics, the exchange and trade of materia medica, the practice of medicine production and the dynamic interactions between medicinal plants, practitioners, knowledge systems, government policies and the herbal products industry.

    Contact: calumblaikie(at)hotmail.com
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  • Maarten Bode
    Maarten Bode
    Maarten Bode is Adjunct Research Faculty at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, and Adjunct Faculty at the Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine (I-AIM), Bangalore. He is in charge of the Indian Medical Heritage Research Network (InMerit) at the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University. Maarten’s current project is entitled “The many faces of traditional Indian medicine: Authentication, commodification, and the politics of value”. He has published extensively on the modernization and commercialization of Indian medical traditions, including the book Taking Traditional Knowledge to the Market: the Modern Image of the Ayurvedic and Unani Industry, c. 1980-2000 (OrientBlackswan 2009).

    Contact: M.Bode(at)uva.nl
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  • Cheris S.C. Chan
    Cheris S.C. Chan
    Cheris S.C. Chan (PhD, Northwestern University 2004) is an Associate Professor in  the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She taught a t the University of Pittsburgh and held fellowships from Stanford University and UCLA. Her current project is a study of the rationalization and the legitimacy of Chinese medicine in mainland China and Hong Kong. She investigates the professional authority of Chinese medical doctors, asking how it is shaped by traditional ancient canon and modern scientific canon under different institutional configurations. Cheris received various international awards in recognition of her work and is the author of Marketing Death (Oxford University Press 2012).

    Contact: cherisch(at)hku.hk
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  • Burton Cleetus
    Burton Cleetus
    Burton Cleetus is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He taught at the Department of History, University of Calicut and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the French Institute of Pondicherry. Burton holds a PhD in Modern Indian History from JNU. He has worked on the history of indigenous healing traditions and their transformations in 19th and 20th Century Kerala, on transnational migration for healthcare, and on the emergence of the pharmaceutical industry in the domain of indigenous medicine. Burton was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation Research Grant in 2009 and the UGC-DAAD Research Fellowship in 2012.

    Contact: burtoncleetus(at)gmail.com
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  • Lucie Dejouhanet
    Lucie Dejouhanet
    Lucie Dejouhanet (Phd, University of Paris X-Nanterre) is Associate Professor of Geography at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, member of AIHP-Géode. Her previous positions include a French National Research Agency-funded Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cermes3, a unit specialized in medicine, science and society in Paris. Lucie's research deals with the collection and marketing of medicinal plants in Kerala and the supply channels of ayurvedic pharmaceutical companies in this Southern Indian State. Her publications revolve around ayurveda and the management and social organization of medicinal plant collection. She is the co-editor of Conflit et rapports sociaux en Asie du Sud (L’Hamattan, 2010).

    Contact: lucie.dejouhanet(at)orange.fr
  • Jean-Paul Gaudillière
    Jean-Paul Gaudillière
    Jean-Paul Gaudillière is Directeur de recherche (Research Professor) at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (Inserm, Paris) and Co-Director of the Centre de Recherches Médecine Sciences Santé et Société (Cermes3, Paris). His research interests have first focused on the molecularization of biology during the 20th century and later on the reconfiguration of medical research after World War II. He is the editor of several volumes on these issues and the author of Inventer la biomédecine (La Découverte, 2002). He is currently working on the history of biological drugs before the advent of gene-based biotechnology, with strong interests in the dynamics of knowledge production, clinical work, and market construction. He has recently coordinated special issues on "Drug Trajectories" (Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 2005) and "How pharmaceuticals became patentable?" (History and Technology 2008).

    Contact: gaudilli(at)vjf.cnrs.fr
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  • Anita Hardon
    Anita Hardon
    Anita Hardon is Professor in Anthropology of Health and Social Care at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (Sociology / Anthropology Department) and Scientific Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), both at the University of Amsterdam. Anita has been involved in comparative studies of health care arrangements, focusing on the global diffusion of contraceptive technologies and modern pharmaceuticals in primary health and family planning programs, on programs to limit the transmission of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases and on global efforts to immunize the world's children. This has led to the development of widely used research frameworks and methodologies (Applied Health Research Manual, 2001) and high impact publications in journals as The Lancet, Social Science and Medicine and Medical Anthropology. She is the author of several influential books such as Social Lives of Medicines (Cambridge University Press 2002) and Medicines out of Control? (Aksant 2004).

    Contact: ahardon(at)xs4all.nl
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  • Elisabeth Hsu
    Elisabeth Hsu
    Elisabeth Hsu is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Green Templeton College. She is course director of the Medical Anthropology Master's Courses and founded a Post-doctoral Anthropology Research Group on Eastern Medicines and Religions in 2006. Her research interests lie within the fields of medical anthropology and ethnobotany; language and text critical studies. They concern Chinese medicine; the transmission of knowledge and practice; body and personhood; touch, pain, feelings, emotions, and sensory experience. She is the author or editor of numerous volumes and special issues, including Plants, Health and Healing (with S. Harris, Berghahn, 2010), Innovation in Chinese Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Transmission of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

    Contact: elisabeth.hsu(at)anthro.ox.ac.uk
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  • Stephan Kloos
    Stephan Kloos
    Stephan Kloos holds a PhD in Medical Anthropology from UC San Francisco and Berkeley (2010), and has over twelve years of research experience on Tibetan medicine in India. In 2013, he received an ECR Starting Grant to conduct an interdisciplinary study of the transnational sowa rigpa industry in India, China, Mongolia and Bhutan. Before that, he has produced the first comprehensive ethnographic and critical history of Tibetan medicine in exile. That work has been funded by Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Austrian Science Foundation, and a Marie Curie fellowship. The author of Tibetan Medicine among the Buddhist Dards of Ladakh (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde, 2004), Stephan holds a position as as a Senior Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Social Anthropology.

    Contact: skloos(at)gmail.com
    Website
  • Wen-Hua Kuo
    Wen-Hua Kuo
    Wen-Hua Kuo (PhD, MIT 2005) is an Associate Professor at National Yang-Ming University, where he lectures social studies of medicine with focuses on Asia. His research revolves around East Asian states and their regulatory engagements with global pharmaceuticals; related writings appear in journals with a variety of disciplines, such as Journal of Law, Medicine, and EthicsDrug Information JournalEast Asian Science, Technology and Society and China Quarterly. He is also the author of “The Voice on the Bridge,” which won the David Edge Prize of the Society for the Social Study of Science in 2011.

    Contact: whkuo(at)ym.edu.tw
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  • Hsueh-Yi Lin
    Hsueh-Yi Lin
    Hsueh-Yi Lin received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010, with a concentration on the intellectual and cultural history of China during the late imperial times.  She is currently a Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her broad research interests lie in the issues of value and identity at the nexus of political and cultural change, the construction of knowledge, and the process of institutionalisation. Her current research projects include a study of the historical memory and transvaluation of Ming-Qing China, the management of the body and state power in early modern China, and the modernization of  Chinese medicine and pharmacy in twentieth century Taiwan.

    Contact: linhsuehyi(at)gmail.com
  • Eunjeong Ma
    Eunjeong Ma holds a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University (2008) and is currently a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Department of Creative IT Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea. Her teaching and research areas span such multidisciplinary themes as the history of science, technology, and medicine in Asia, gender and technology, emerging technologies, and humanities and engineering. Building on her doctoral and postdoctoral research pertaining to the interrelationship between the state and medicines, she is completing a book manuscript, titled Fragile Epistemologies and Technologies of Materialities: Drugs, Laws and the State in Postcolonial Korea.

    Contact: eunjma(at)postech.ac.kr
  • Harilal Madhavan
    Harilal Madhavan
    Harilal Madhavan is Assistant Professor and Member of the Health, Nutrition and Development Team at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. He recently completed a joint postdoctoral position with the French Institute of Pondicherry and the Center for Research on Medicine, Science, Health and Society (Cermes3 – CNRS/EHESS/Inserm) in Paris. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram – Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Harilal’s doctoral thesis investigated the growth and transition of ayurvedic medicine Industry in Kerala. His current research is focused on innovations and benefit sharing mechanisms in ‘Indigenous Pharmaceuticals’. He has published on the recent history of ayurvedic pharmaceuticals, growth and linkages of the industry and property right issues.

    Contact: harilalms(at)gmail.com
  • Laurent Pordié
    Laurent Pordié
    Laurent Pordié is an anthropologist and a pharmacologist, Senior Researcher with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Cermes3, a unit focused on medicine, science and society in Paris. He teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Laurent founded the PharmAsia Network and currently acts as its coordinator. His works include the books Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World (Routledge, 2008 - winner of the ICAS Book Prize 2009) and Les nouveaux guérisseurs (with E. Simon, Editions de l’EHESS, 2013), as well as the special issues 'Asian Therapeutic Knowledge and Globalization' (Revue d'Anthropologie des Connaissances, 2011), 'Transnational Health in Asia' (European Journal of Transnational Studies, 2013), 'Learning Institutions in South Asian Medicine' (Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, 2014),  'The Herbal Pharmaceutical Industry in India' (Asian Medicine, 2014), 'Drugs' Stories and Itineraries' (Anthropology & Medicine, 2015) and 'Diversions of Biomedical Technologies in a Globalized World' (Medical Anthropology, 2016).

    Contact: laurent.pordie(at)ehess.fr
    Webpage
  • Martin Saxer
    Martin Saxer
    Martin Saxer (PhD Oxford, 2010) is a Marie Curie fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Munich. He was a Clarendon scholar at Oxford and a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore. His publications include Manufacturing Tibetan Medicine. The Creation of an Industry and the Moral Economy of Tibetanness (Berghahn, 2013). Martin conducted extensive fieldwork in Siberia, Tibet and Nepal since 2003. He directed two feature length documentary films and recently started the visual ethnography blog The other image. His current research on "neighbouring China" is supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship.

    Contact: jmsaxer(at)gmail.com
    Institutional webpage
    Website
  • Mona Schrempf
    Mona Schrempf
    Mona Schrempf (PhD 2001, Free University Berlin) is a social and cultural anthropologist, Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the East Medicine Research Centre, Complementary Medicine, School of Life Sciences, University of Westminster in London. She is the co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Asian Medicine. Mona’s current research is part of the Wellcome Trust Research Project "Beyond Tradition: Ways of Knowing and Styles of Practice in East Asian Medicine 1000 to the Present" and examines the globalization of Tibetan medical practice in Europe and Asia. Among her publications are, Medicine between Science and Religion. Explorations of Tibetan Grounds (Berghahn 2010), Studies of Medical Pluralism in Tibetan History and Society (IITBS 2010), Figurations of Modernity. Global and Local Representations in Comparative Perspective (Campus 2008), and Soundings in Tibetan Medicine (Brill 2007).

    Contact: m.schrempf(at)westminster.ac.uk
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  • Arielle Smith
    Arielle Smith
    Arielle Smith Arielle Smith completed her doctorate and postgraduate teaching in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford (2004-2010). She subsequently taught at the University of Montana (2011-2012) and as traveling faculty for International Honors Program/SIT (2012-2014). Most recently, she conducted postdoctoral research at Cermes3 (a joint unit of CNRS, EHESS, and Inserm) in Paris (2015), and preliminary research on anthropological reflexivity and tribal health/ healing in the USA (2016 to date). Her monograph Capturing Quicksilver. The Position, Power, and Plasticity of Chinese Medicine in Singapore was published by Berghahn Books in 2018.
  • Lena Springer
    Lena Springer
    Lena Springer is Research Fellow at EASTmedicine, University of Westminster in London where she works on the Wellcome Trust-funded project "Beyond Tradition: Ways of Knowing and Styles of Practice in East Asian Medicines, 1000 to the present": Based on fieldwork in China where providers and prescribers of medicines with conflicting histories coexist, she is writing a monograph about Chinese medicinal substances. Lena has taught courses in Sinology at the University of Vienna (2006-2013) and was visiting researcher at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (2008). In Vienna she investigated how highly-skilled Chinese medicine practitioners and their colleagues, clients and family undergo (or are excluded from) processes of establishing their positions in society. Her forthcoming book reconstructs narrated careers of senior Chinese medicine practitioners in the PRC.

    Contact: L.Springer(at)westminster.ac.uk
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  • Maki Umemura
    Maki Umemura
    Maki Umemura is a Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Cardiff University. Her research interests are in comparative economic and business history, medical history, and Japanese business. Her publications include “Reconsidering the Business of Pharmaceuticals,” Enterprise and Society (2010) and the monograph The Japanese Pharmaceutical Industry (Routledge, 2011). She obtained her PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE).

    Contact: umemuram(at)cardiff.ac.uk
    Website
    Institutional webpage
  • Jan M.A. van der Valk
    Jan M.A. van der Valk
    Jan M.A. van der Valk is a PhD Candidate at the School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent (UK). The working title of his doctoral research is ‘From plants to Tibetan pills: pharmaceutical transmutation at the interface of India and Europe’. Jan aims to use his academic background in biology and ethnobotany to better understand the complexities surrounding the sourcing and processing of three Tibetan materia medica. Fieldwork is carried out mainly at PADMA AG in Zürich (Switzerland), and Dharamshala (Himachal Pradesh, India), which are two important places of production. The research emphasises India-Europe connections. In conducting an ethnography of these plants, the theoretical areas of interest are the mobility of plants and medicines, their materiality, and governance.

    Contact: jmav3(at)kent.ac.uk
  • Francis Zimmermann
    Francis Zimmermann teaches South Asian anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. Trained in philosophy, Sanskrit and cognitive anthropology, he studied Ayurvedic medicine and pharmacy in South India under the guidance of Vayaskara N.S. Mooss (1912-1986), one of the famous Ashtavaidyas of Kerala, and he has been preparing scholarly editions of Malayalam and Sanskrit texts of materia medica that were in use among learned physicians. He is the author of The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats (Berkeley, 1982; several reprints Delhi) and of a number of books on Ayurvedic medicine and other cognitive topics.

    Contact: francis.zimmermann(at)ehess.fr
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