Social and Pharmaceutical issues in pandemic times. Report of the conversations of the Anthropologies Association

Abstract

For this discussion on how the Social and the Pharmaceutical issues are interwoven in these times of pandemic, the notion of "mindful body" was used in which Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987: 6-41) proposed a form of analysis of the body and the health that can be applicable to the case of the use of medicines. The debate regarding the "medicalization" and "pharmaceuticalization" that has become evident in our society due to the pandemic was contextualized. From the human sciences and the pharmaceutical sciences, theoretical frameworks of medical anthropology, the anthropology of the body and the medication experience were linked. To argue the link between the social and the pharmaceutical, the books "Social Lives of Medicines" by Whyte, Van der Geest and Hardon (2002) and "Medicines and Society" by Britten (2008) were used, which were proposed in conversation with the relational approach in the study of collective health by Menéndez (2009) and with the philosophical perspective of Byung-Chul Han (2018) developed in the book “The Burnout Society”. This discussion became a space for reflection and debate that made it possible to listen to the comments of the participants from different parts of the world, as well as from different academic disciplines. These meetings gave rise to a broader and deeper vision of what the pandemic has revealed, not only as a physical disease, but also in the psychological, emotional, social and political dimensions that converge in all of us as human beings.

KEY WORDS: medical anthropology; biopolitics; human sciences; pharmaceutical sciences; medicalization; pharmaceutical; COVID-19 pandemic.