Pharmocracy: Value, Politics, And Knowledge In Global Biomedicine (experimental [Paperback]

Continuing his pioneering theoretical explorations into the relationships among biosciences, the market, and political economy, Kaushik Sunder Rajan introduces the concept ofpharmocracyto explain the structure and operation of the global hegemony of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. He reveals pharmocracy's logic in two case studies from contemporary India: the controversial introduction of an HPV vaccine in 2010, and the Indian Patent Office's denial of a patent for an anticancer drug in 2006 and ensuing legal battles. In each instance health was appropriated by capital and transformed from an embodied state of well-being into an abstract category made subject to capital's interests. These cases demonstrate the precarious situation in which pharmocracy places democracy, as India's accommodation of global pharmaceutical regulatory frameworks pits the interests of its citizens against those of international capital. Sunder Rajan's insights into this dynamic make clear the high stakes of pharmocracy's intersection with health, politics, and democracy.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan traces the structure and operation of what he calls pharmocracy—a concept explaining the global hegemony of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. He outlines pharmocracy's logic in two case studies from contemporary India to demonstrate the stakes of its intersection with health, politics, democracy, and global capital.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author ofBiocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, also published by Duke University Press.

"This book offers the most incisive, compelling analysis yet of the multinational pharmaceutical industry—of the mechanisms by which health is appropriated by capital, and the empirically distinct ways in which this takes place in different locations across the globe. As Kaushik Sundl³>