Cori Hayden

Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of California – Berkeley

Thursday, October 15, 2009

STS BROWNBAG
"A Conversation with Cori Hayden"
12:00pm – 1:30pm in 8108 Social Science Building

LECTURE
"New Same Things: Generic Medicines, Drug Access, and the Making of Pharma-Equivalencies"
4:00pm – 5:00pm in 8417 Social Science Building
(Reception at 3:30pm)

Lecture Abstract:
The production and circulation of copied pharmaceuticals – cheaper, usually, than their patented, name-brand counterparts – have become central to efforts to improve access to medicines, North and South. The politics of access writ large is thus in many ways a politics of the substitute, in which generics manufacturers, state regulators, health advocates, international trade bodies, the transnational pharmaceutical industry, and consumers, patients, and activists all engage in highly charged contests over what shall count as a “good enough,” or a proper, copy. Such negotiations have become particularly pointed in Mexico, where, over the last decade, state efforts to foster public awareness of the generic substitute and its 'interchangeability' have been both helped and hindered by a wildly popular commercial pharmacy chain trafficking in 'the similar'.

In this paper I seek to open up to ethnographic inquiry the notions of similarity, equivalence, and difference, turning to practices in quality control in manufacturing, pharmacology, regulation, and marketing in order to understand how particular relations of sameness, difference, and similarity are produced and contested. Ultimately, I argue that current pharmaceutical politics and practices make vivid demands on our analytic lexicons, requiring us to reconsider equivalence, similarity, interchangeability – and even 'the generic' itself – as ethnographic terms, constituted in and by their historical specificity and irreducible materialities. This is important both analytically and politically, as the matter of who can claim equivalence – and how – remains the dominant question in the global politics of pharmaceutical access.

Cori Hayden is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2000 and has held postdoctoral research fellowships at Girton College, Cambridge University (UK) and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, UC San Diego. She works in the anthropology of science, medicine, and technology, with a particular interest in Latin America, intellectual property, and pharmaceutical politics, broadly understood. Indicative publications include “A Generic Solution? Pharmaceuticals and the Politics of the Similar in Mexico,” Current Anthropology, 2007; “Taking as Giving,” Social Studies of Science, 2007; “From Market to Market,” American Ethnologist 2003; When Nature Goes Public, Princeton University Press, 2003; and “Gender, Genetics, Generation,” Cultural Anthropology, 1995.