Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Industrial Production of Medications in France

与美国不同，顺势疗法在法国的消费者保健市场中扮演着重要的角色，在美国，顺势疗法只扮演着微不足道的角色。在法国，它既与生物医学竞争，又与生物医学互补。这种战略模糊的中心是顺势疗法药物的球状颗粒(小珠子)，它们被制造出来体现这种双重作用。通过直接观察和采访法国顺势疗法药物工业化生产中的主要参与者，该项目解决了以下问题。顺势疗法是如何作为生物医学疗法的争论点和补充发挥作用的？知识价值尽管顺势疗法在法国和包括美国在内的其他地方的市场占有率越来越高，但它在很大程度上没有引起人类学和科学社会学研究学者的注意。该项目将开始填补我们知识中的这一空白，并阐明替代治疗制度的工业层面。它将侧重于知识、技术和政治在治疗商品的生产中发挥决定性作用的过程的范围。顺势疗法的生产需要通过应用各种技术(如农业、实验室、制造)和各种形式的专门知识(如农业、科学、营销、监管)，进行持续的物质和象征性转化。这一生产过程是如何受到循证研究、技术和专业知识、价值观和意识形态、国家和国际监管以及一系列不确定性的影响的，是这次调查的核心。它涉及与科学的社会研究、医学和药学的人类学以及人类学和商业社会学相关的知识领域，以产生一种综合的分析方法。潜在的更广泛的影响这项研究的结果将为社会科学提供一个急需的工具，以扩大其传统领域，包括其技术、材料和方法与生物医学的映射和背离，并重新思考其身份和活动位于医学人类学传统领域内外的医疗保健类别。

IntroductionHomeopathy plays a prominent role in the consumer healthcare market in France, unlike the US where it plays a marginal role. In France, it both competes with and is complementary to biomedicine. At the center of this strategic ambiguity are the globules (small beads) of homeopathic medicines, which are made to embody this dual role. By directly observing and interviewing key actors in the industrial production of homeopathic medicines in France, this project addresses the following question. How are homeopathic remedies produced to function as both a contestation of and complement to biomedical therapies? Intellectual meritDespite its increasing market presence in France and elsewhere, including the United States, homeopathy has largely failed to garner the attention of scholars of anthropology and the social studies of science. This project will begin to fill this gap in our knowledge and shed light on the industrial dimensions of an alternative treatment regime. It will focus on the range of processes by which knowledge, technology, and politics play decisive roles in the production of a treatment commodity. The production of a homeopathic remedy entails continual material and symbolic transformation through the application of various technologies (such as agricultural, laboratory, manufacturing) and forms of expertise (such as farming, scientific, marketing, regulatory). How this production process is shaped by evidence-based research, technologies and expertise, values and ideologies, national and international regulation, and a host of uncertainties is at the core of this inquiry. It engages domains of knowledge related to the social studies of science, the anthropology of medicine and pharmaceuticals, and the anthropology and sociology of business in order to produce an integrative analytic approach.Potential broader impactsThe results of this study will provide the social sciences with a much-needed tool to expand its traditional domains to include sites whose technologies, materials and methods both mirror and diverge from those of biomedicine and rethink a category of healthcare whose identity and activities situate it both inside and outside the traditional domains of medical anthropology.