EXPLORING ASIAN INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE
PharmAsia is an international social sciences research network dedicated to the study of herbal pharmaceutical industry in Asia. In spite of the remarkable growth of this industry in the last two decades, little attention has been given to it from either history or anthropology. Our multidisciplinary research group aims at framing this important domain of study.
Established in 2012, PharmAsia explores the complex interface between globalization and innovation processes, regulatory systems and market construction in a region playing an ever greater role in the pharmaceutical sector and more broadly, in the global economy and its regulation. Our current sites of research are located in India, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Cambodia and Indonesia.
How do we create new "traditional" Asian drugs that target the biomedically-defined disorders of a global clientele? How does this (medical-)transcultural process translate epistemologically? What are the implications in terms of market construction and appropriation and protection of innovations? PharmAsia attempts to provide empirical and theoretical perspectives to these problems, and others, by mobilizing scientists ranging from textual specialists to historian of science and medicine, social and medical anthropologists, scholars in science and technology studies, political scientists, legal specialists, and economists.
Research is organized along five main axis:
* Innovation and drug discovery
* Regimes of intellectual property protection
* Industrial mass production
* Diffusion and marketing
* Consumption
PharmAsia organizes conferences and seminars (France, Macao, Holland, Singapore, Korea, U.K.), produces collective publications and encourages the institutional exchange of scholars with the aim to set out new research avenues to study the industrialization of Asian medicine.
FOCUS: RECENTS VOLUMES BY THE PHARMASIA COLLECTIVE
