My research focuses on the anthropology of the biochemical sciences, global pharmaceutical politics, and postcolonial engagements with intellectual property, copying, and the politics of innovation and appropriation. These themes animated my 2003 book, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico, which examined the consequences of novel drug discovery partnerships linking global drug companies, Latin American research scientists, and indigenous communities. A key theme emerging from that work was how new deployments of the idioms of intellectual property serve as engines of both privatization and ‘public-ization,’ or the reconfiguration of notions of the public, the commons, and the public domain. Subsequent projects have taken up this concern in a variety of ways, including in the ethics of benefit-sharing in clinical trials (Taking as Giving), the ways that liberal concerns over piracy and improper copying continue to animate liberatory projects undertaken in the name of the public domain (The Proper Copy), and an investigation of how appeals to the ‘popular’ and populism may disrupt liberal epistemologies organized around public and private.
My latest book is The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and the Simipolitical in Mexico (Duke, 2023), which examines the recent emergence of a cheap popular market for generic medicines in Mexico. Focusing on the market-oriented “exuberance” that has attached to copied, generic medicines in Latin American and global circuits, the book seeks to understand the forms of value, popular politics, and distinction emerging today under the sign of makingthe same
Among the other things that keep me busy:
“The Cloud and the Crowd” has included a UC Humanities Network-funded faculty research group, special events, and a graduate seminar
“Good Copy/Bad Copy,” funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, is a workshop and ongoing research project co-directed with Professor Julia Hornberger (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg).
As a member of the Board of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (2009-2014), I worked with John Hartigan to co-organize the SCA 2014 Bi-annual Conference, “The End(s) of Work” (Detroit, Michigan).
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Positions held
Chair, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley (July 2014-June 2016)
Director, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS), UC Berkeley (2010-2013)
Associate Director, CSTMS (2007-2010)
Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford CA, 2008-2009
Research Fellow in Social Anthropology, Girton College, University of Cambridge (UK) 2001-2004
Education
Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, University of California-Santa Cruz, 2000
M.A. in Cultural Anthropology, University of California-Santa Cruz, 1994
B.A. in Anthropology and Women's Studies, University of Virginia, 1992
2013 “Distinctively Similar,” U.C. Davis Law Review 47(2): 601-632.
2012 “Rethinking Reductionism, or, the Transformative Work of Making the Same,” Anthropological Forum 22(3): 271-283.
2012. “Population: A Chemical Device” in C. Lury and N. Wakeford, eds, Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social. London: Routledge.
2011 “No patent, no generic: Pharmaceutical Access and the Politics of the Copy” in Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, ed Biagioli, Jaszi, and Woodmansee. University of Chicago press, pp. 285-304. (Also published in Portuguese as, Sem patente não há genérico: acesso farmaceutico e políticas de cópia." Sociologias(Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil). 19 (Jan/Jun): 62-90).
2010. “The proper copy: the insides and outsides of domains made public”, The Journal of Cultural Economy 3 (1): 85-102
2007. “A generic solution? Pharmaceuticals and the politics of the similar in Mexico,” Major article with commentary, Current Anthropology 48 (4): 475-495
2007. “Taking as giving: Bioscience, exchange, and the rise of an ethic of benefit-sharing," Social Studies of Science (5): 729–75
2005. “Bioprospecting’s representational dilemma,” Science as Culture, Special Issue on Postcolonial Science Studies, edited by Maureen McNeil. 14 (2): 185-200.
2004. "Prospecting's Publics." In Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey, eds. Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy, pp. 115-138. Oxford and New York: Berg Press.
2003. “From market to market: Bioprospecting’s idioms of inclusion.” American Ethnologist 30 (3):359-371.
2003. “Suspended animation: A brine shrimp essay.” In Margaret Lock and Sarah Franklin, eds., Animation and Cessation: The Anthropology of Life and Death. Santa Fe: School of American Research.
1995. "Gender, Genetics, and Generation: Reformulating Biology in Lesbian Kinship," Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1 (February):41-63.
