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PhD Supervision

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tania Porqueddu, Diabetes among South Asians in Edinburgh

Hanna Mantila, Psychopharmaceutical prescriptions in Hong Kong

Ben Epstein, Psychiatry in Japan

  

Biographical Statement

Stefan Ecks, MA, DEA, PhD, is Director of the Medical Anthropology Programme and a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology. He studied anthropology, sociology, and philosophy at Goettingen, the University of California at Berkeley, the School of Oriental & African Studies, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and graduated with a PhD from the London School of Economics. 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 was Co-Investigator in the ESRC/DFID-funded project Tracing Pharmaceuticals in South Asia that studied the trajectories of key drugs through production, distribution, prescription and consumption in India and Nepal. He held visiting fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg, the Brocher Foundation at Geneva, and serves on the Editorial Boards of Anthropology & Medicine and Medical Anthropology.

 

Publications

(forthcoming) Mind Food: Plural Mood Medications in India. New York: New York University Press.

(forthcoming) Psychopharmaceuticals in India: Antidepressants in a Globalizing World. London: Routledge.

(forthcoming) (with Ian Harper) "'There Is No Regulation, Actually': The Private Market for Anti-TB Drugs in India." In J. Biehl & A. Petryna (Eds.), When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

2010 "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.

2010 "Near-Liberalism: Global Corporate Citizenship and Pharmaceutical Marketing in India." In Aihwa Ong & Nancy Chen (Eds.), Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2010 "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. 

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 (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.

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.

 

PhD in Social Anthropology