Transforming Pharmaceutical Capacities: Experimenting with Antibiotics in Food and Beer Production in Tanzania

• In Event: Producing Transformations: Drugs, Bodies, and Experimentation 1

Abstract

Powerful antibiotics are readily available for purchase throughout Tanzania, and Western policy makers regularly decry this situation as dangerous and disordered, as if no rules govern the use of antibiotics in Africa. While Western biomedicine perceives pharmaceuticals as cures for disease, in Tanzania such medicines are understood to be volatile and potentially dangerous substances- one among many unpredictable, fluctuating, and highly contemporary forces from outside, whose potentials are at once positive and negative. In the prevailing Western understanding of antibiotic use in Africa, ‘truth’ lies in the science that goes into the making and proper prescription of drugs, and such deviations as ‘overuse’ result from the fact that locals misunderstand what these drugs are and how they should be used. In this paper, based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that Tanzanian practices are aimed at determining the ‘true’ nature of these drugs, at differentiating types of drugs, and at establishing control over their variable capacities. I explore this process through two examples: the popular discourse critiquing the role of antibiotics in the husbandry of ‘modern’ chickens, and the role of bitter antibiotics as a flavor and potency-enhancer in locally brewed beer. These examples demonstrate how Tanzanians both resist and remake the capacities and potentialities of antibiotics, while also emphasizing the role that embodied epistemological practices play in the production of knowledge.

Author

• Laura Meek, University of California, Davis