ABSTRACT
Therapeutic remedies have long traveled across the world; merchants visiting the ports of Southeast Asia from at least the fifteenth century sold Chinese herbal medicines and herbal remedies from Egypt were used in medieval Europe. In this chapter, we focus on the marketing of modern medicines. We present concerns about medicalization that emerged in the 1970s, and offer critical analyses of the more recent global marketing of lifestyle drugs. Social science scholars who study these processes have, as a common point of departure, a strong theoretical sense of globalization. Through the global flow of modern pharmaceuticals, and the communication and advertising campaigns promoting their use, people worldwide are prescribed medicines to enhance their everyday lives and to treat routine variations in mood, such as feeling sad and irritable. But just how homogenous is this commodification of wellbeing? Do people around the world turn to the same pharmaceuticals, and do they do so in the same way? We outline how anthropologists who study local medicine markets reveal diverse forms of globalization. Medicines divert from their intended paths, and people use them creatively for their own perceived needs.
