What's at stake in the fake?

Indian pharmaceuticals, African markets and global health


Fake prevention: Exploring the threat of fake pharmaceuticals on Tanzanian’s women ability to access their reproductive rights

Rhoda Bandora

My Masters Research thesis, titled “Fake prevention”: Exploring the threat of fake pharmaceuticals on Tanzanian’s women ability to access their reproductive rights, explores the lived experiences of women negotiating their access to contraceptives amidst Tanzania’s new reform to end family planning by attempting to understand women’s reactions to and their coping to with this policy […]

Fununu kuhusu vitu feki – ‘rumours about things fake’

Dr Fatima Bapumia

Fatima Bapumia is a research fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health. She is a sociologist, having received her PhD from the University of Leipzig. Her PhD addresses the dynamics of cultural boundaries among ethno-racial minorities in Tanzania. As participant observer, Fatima worked with high school youngsters identifying themselves as South Asian, Arab and […]

Policing the fake: Regulation, Xenophobia and the rise of ‘fake-talk’ in South Africa

Dr Edmore Chitukutuku

I am an anthropologist of the state working on state sponsored violence and control in Africa. My research topic for this project is on policing the fake: regulation, xenophobia and the rise of fake talk in South Africa. This is important to study because the rise of xenophobia enhanced fake talk around foreign goods and […]

Medicines, India(n), and ‘fakery’: Charting the social lives of pharma suspicions in Tanzania

Dr René Gerrets

Gerrets’ research will track and examine how modes of ‘pharma fake talk’ inform and animate actors and institutions along various points of drug supply chains, including the sense-making, suspicions and contestations this ‘idiom’ contributes to and illuminates.  A central idea inspiring this research is that ‘fake’ or ‘real’ are not necessarily discrete entities whose meanings […]

Fakes, kingpins, controversy and scandal: The making of india as a global pharma player

Sarah Hodges

I am an historian of the politics of health in modern India. Within the “what’s at stake in the fake” project, my own research examines the role of India in the international political economy of pharmaceuticals, 1970-present. Today, there are, broadly speaking, two opposing sets of views about the role of India in the international […]

Policing fake drugs

Julia Hornberger

I am an anthropologist of policing and health, particularly in Africa. I am interested in how technologies are being used to divide good medications from bad medications.  Technologies here can be anything from law and legal regulations to police practice of raids and investigation, laboratory practices, packaging, holograms, testing devices and minilabs. These technologies are […]

People’s knowledge about ‘fake’ antimalarial drugs: The case of Morogoro town, Tanzania

Keketso Peete

My research project in centralised on uncovering the knowledge local people living, working and visiting the city of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, have about ‘fake’ pharmaceutical drugs,  antimalarial drugs in particular. Since there seem to be a global health concern around the availability of ‘fake’ pharmaceutical drugs circulating in society, especially in Tanzania, I […]

Mapping Fake-Talk in Global Health

Christopher Sirrs

In this project, I am asking two fundamental questions. What forms has ‘fake-talk’ taken in global health, and how and why did these concepts gain purchase? My aim is to create a ‘genealogy’ of ‘fake-talk’ in global health from c.1948, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) was established, to the present. I am not concerned […]

Gujaratis, pharma and African markets: Ethnographies of authenticity from the outside in

Nishpriha Thakur

My name is Dr Nishpriha Thakur. I am a cultural anthropologist of Indian markets, marketplaces and merchants. Within the ‘what’s at stake in the fake’ project, my research examines Gujarati merchants, markets and marketplaces within India’s international pharma trade—particularly in East and Southern Africa.  I will conduct transnational, multi-sited ethnographic research across Gujarat and East […]