Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropological Exploration of Antibiotic Use

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The World Health Organization reports that the overuse of antibiotics (and the corresponding rise of antimicrobial resistance) is one of the greatest contemporary challenges to global health, but anthropological scholarship about the vernacular uses and meanings of antibiotics remains limited. Studies on antibiotics in East Africa in particular tend to assume that overuse is driven by political-economic and legal conditions, and suggest stricter regulations as the best intervention. This study will provide a timely contribution to this critically important issue by detailing why and how antibiotics are used by the public in Tanzania, where powerful antibiotics are readily available over-the-counter. The PIs will conduct ethnographic research on the multiple uses and meanings of antibiotics in an effort to understand and eventually demonstrate the logics of drug use. The objectives of this project are: 1) to learn where and how people acquire their knowledge of antibiotics, and to trace the narratives they tell about the uses and characteristics of them; 2) to understand how different groups of people attribute potency to certain antibiotics, and what they imagine the sources of these potencies to be; 3) to analyze how antibiotic uses and meanings take shape in dialogue with other treatment regimes; and 4) to gain insight into how drug use contributes to particular understandings of health, the body, and society, which in turn influence choices about drug use. The research will be based on interviews, personal histories of disease and treatment, and close observation and engagement with antibiotics users and distributors in the field (pharmacists, doctors, ordinary users). Once disseminated, this study will contribute to a better understanding of antibiotic use in Tanzania, and help policy makers and medical practitioners who want to influence or understand how people use antibiotics. This project will also support the scientific training of a promising scholar.