More-than-Global Health in Mozambique: The Many Transnationalisms of Medicine across the Indian Ocean

• In Event: Global Medicine from the South? Emerging Markets and Indian Ocean Medical Worlds - I

Abstract

Accounts of global health and global pharmaceuticals have often emphasized the global South as a site of value extraction or as an inspiring alternative to hegemonic regimes of pharma-capital. This paper examines the longevity and heterogeneity of transnational corporate forms through which markets has long been made in Mozambique. It argues for attention to heterogenous transnational forms that are neither outside of nor determined by dominant regimes of health, development, and capital. Tracing this heterogeneity through three examples – a Brazilian project to build a pharmaceutical factory in Maputo, realized under the auspices of “South-South cooperation”; the pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors through which generic drugs arrive in Maputo; and the experiences of pharmacists and consumers – the paper describes the complex, hierarchical, racialized, and historically deep relationships through which markets are constituted amid transnational relations of production, distribution, and extraction. These relations, I conclude, not only shape practices of pharmaceutical consumption and the possibilities for health that accompany them; they also make visible the ambivalent politics of Indian Ocean pharma-capital.

Author

• Ramah McKay, University of Pennsylvania