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Research Interests

• South Asia (especially Bengal)
  
• medical anthropology
• anthropology of pharmaceuticals
• transcultural psychiatry
  
• theory and history of anthropology
  
• Hinduism and the anthropology of religion
  

 

PhD Supervision

I am interested in supervising research in all areas of medical anthropology, especially topics relating to pharmaceuticals and mental health in South Asia. 

Current PhD students:

(completed in 2009) Cornelia Guell, Chronic Illness at the Margins: Turkish Immigrant Experiences of Type 2 Diabetes in Germany (funded by Wenner-Grenn and ESRC)

(writing up) Kate Milosavljevic, Bodies of Memory, States of Health: Disability in Post-conflict Serbia (funded by Wingate Foundation and Edinburgh University)

(writing up) Phoebe Rose, Autism in India: Therapeutic Choice after Changes to Intellectual Property Law (funded by ESRC)

(fieldwork in progress) Jeyanithe Arumugam Karunanithy, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and the Tamil Refugee Community in Canada (funded by Wenner-Gren and Edinburgh University)

(fieldwork in progress) Dr Laszlo Lajtai, Language and Social Inequality in Mauritian Psychiatry

(pre-fieldwork) Cristobal Bonelli, Mapuche Healing Cosmologies (funded by the Chilean Government)

(pre-fieldwork) Daisy Fung, Humanitarian Governmentality and Enduring Exception: Medicine, Labour, and Charitable Longing in a US Aid Organization

 

Biographical Statement

Stefan Ecks, MA, DEA, PhD, is Acting Director of the Anthropology of Health & Illness Programme and a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He studied anthropology, sociology, and philosophy at the University of Göttingen (1992-94), the University of California at Berkeley (1994-95), the School of Oriental & African Studies (1995-97), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (1997-98), and graduated with a PhD from the London School of Economics in 2003. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork on health and medicine in India since 1999, focusing on postcolonial notions of body, health and plural healing. His current work looks at emerging forms of pharmaceutical uses, evidence-based medicine, and global corporate citizenship in South Asia. From 2006 to 2009, he is Co-Investigator in the ESRC/DFID-funded project Tracing Pharmaceuticals in South Asia that studies the trajectories of key drugs through production, distribution, prescription and consumption in India and Nepal. He has been assistant professor at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (2001-2004), held visiting fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley and the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg, and serves on the Editorial Boards of Anthropology & Medicine and Medical Anthropology.

 

Selected Publications

Forthcoming

India on Prozac: Antidepressants in a Globalizing World. (in preparation)

Digesting Modern Medicine: Body, Illness, and Plural Pills in India. (in preparation)

"Near-Liberalism: Global Corporate Citizenship and Pharmaceutical Marketing in India." In Nancy Chen & Aihwa Ong (Eds.), Asian Biotechnologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (in press)

"A Polyspherology of Psychopharmaceuticals: Globalization, Capitalism, and Psychiatry." In Janis Jenkins (Ed.), Psychopharmacolgy, Imaginary and Self:  Studies in Subjectivity and Globalization. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press (in press)

"Rethinking the 'Treatment Gap' for Antidepressants in South Asia." Journal of Health Studies (in press)

"Spectacles of Reason: An Ethnography of Calcutta Gastroenterologists."  In J. Edwards, P. Harvey & P. Wade (Eds.), Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies: Anthropological Approaches to a New Politics of Vision. Oxford: Berghahn (in press)

"Overprescription of Psychopharmaceuticals in India." Newsletter of the Indian Medical Parliamentarians' Forum (IMPF) (in press)

 

Selected publications 2004-2009

2009 (with Soumita Basu) "The Unlicensed Lives of Antidepressants in India: Generic Drugs, Unqualified Practitioners, and Floating Prescriptions." Transcultural Psychiatry 46(1): 86-106.

2009 "Welcome Home, Descartes! Rethinking the Anthropology of the Body." Perspectives in Biology & Medicine 52(1): 53-58.

2009 "Three Propositions for an Evidence-based Medical Anthropology." In Matthew Engelke (Ed.), Objects of Evidence. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

2008 "Global Pharmaceutical Markets and Corporate Citizenship: The Case of Novartis' Anti-cancer Drug Glivec." BioSocieties 3(2): 165-181.

2008 "Three Propositions for an Evidence-based Medical Anthropology." Special Issue Objects of Evidence, Matthew Engelke (Ed.), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, S77-S92.

2008 "B.K. Malinowski"; "E.E. Evans-Pritchard"; "A.R. Radcliffe-Brown." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd Ed.

2007 "Response to 'A Generic Solution: Pharmaceuticals and the politics of the similar in Mexico' by Cori Hayden." Current Anthropology, 48(4): 490-491.

2007 (with Roger Jeffery & Petra Brhlikova) "Global Assemblages of Pharmaceuticals: Rethinking TRIPS and GMP." Biblio 30(3): 45-52.

2007 (with P.N. Ngang, J. Ntaganira, A. Kalk, S. Wolter) "Perceptions and beliefs about cough and tuberculosis and implications for TB control in rural Rwanda." International Journal of Lung Diseases 11(10): 1108-1113.

2006 (with Angelika Wolf & Johannes Sommerfeld) "Medical Anthropologies in Germany." In F. Saillant & S. Genest (Eds.), Medical Anthropology: Regional Perspectives, Shared Concerns. Oxford: Blackwell.

2006 "Response to Monica Konrad 'Placebo Politics: On Comparability, Interdisciplinarity and International Collaborative Research'" Monash Bioethics Review 25(4): 87-92.

2005 (edited, with William S. Sax) Special Issue: The Ills of Marginality: New Perspectives on Subaltern Health in South Asia. Anthropology & Medicine 12(3)

2005 "Pharmaceutical Citizenship: Antidepressant Marketing and the Promise of Demarginalization in India." Anthropology & Medicine 12(3): 239-254.

2004 "Bodily Sovereignty as Political Sovereignty: 'Self-care' in Kolkata (India)." Anthropology & Medicine 11(1): 75-89.

2004 (with Robert Frank) "Towards an Ethnography of Indian Homeopathy." Anthropology & Medicine 11(3): 305-324.