"Pharmaceuticals in the Register of the Local", by Veena and Ranendra Das
Veena Das Abstract: This paper examines the circulation of pharmaceuticals in the low income localities in Delhi (India) and argues that what is at stake in local worlds is articulated through articulation between medical practices, forms of belongingess and informal regimes of labor. We show the relation between the traffic in categories between practitioners and patients and argue that consumption of pharmaceuticals cannot be understood through recourse to simple models of belief and meaning. Rather there is a tremendous struggle to author the real. We show that experiments with categories and medicines take place in specific worlds in relation to concrete problems of life, labor, and language and are not the outcome of ghostly forces lying between tradition and modernity that somehow the haunt the present.
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