Vital Experiments: Living (and Dying) with Pharmaceuticals after the Human

This international workshop, organised by the collaborative research project “Life in the Midst of Pharmaceutical Transformations”  built on recent efforts in science studies, social history of medicine and medical anthropology to account for the complex pharmaceutical assemblages that cut across changing scientific values, traveling public health agendas, and emergent technosocial orders in the aftermath of the welfare state and global medicine. The organisers aimed to draw together various ethnographic explorations of such assemblages to unpack the entanglements of diseased bodies, medical knowledges, and healthcare from a pharmaceutically grounded perspective. How do old and new medications perform the relationships and tensions between the lab and the clinic, between medical professionals and patients, and between different medical traditions in what one might call “experimental societies”? What is at stake in such pharmaceutical entanglements after the falling apart of the universal human in biomedicine? These were some of the broader questions addressed in this workshop that brought together anthropologists and social scientists of medicine from Japan and around the world in the hope of opening up space for shared methods and collaborative inquiry.