G Lasco
Biographic Data
| ID | 52426 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Lasco |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Lasco |
| SIGNATURE | LASCO G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ateneo de Manila University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6402-682X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“The river is dead, the lake is dying, the bay is still alive”: Vital debates and environmental necropolitics in the Philippines
Amid an “environmental necropolitics” and a neoliberal paradigm of economic development that views rivers, lakes, and seas as resources to be exploited, sites to be displaced, or land to be “reclaimed”, environmental debates in the Philippines have sedimented around the vital status of the bodies of water in question. In some instances, government agencies and private corporations stake the legitimacy of their infrastructure projects with the cla…
Miracle cures, wonder drugs, and unproven treatments for Covid-19: A global database
Antecedents to Rodrigo Duterte’s Drug War: The Anti-Drug Campaigns of Joseph Estrada (2000) and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2003)
More-than-parental care: Exploring the roles of significant others in nurturing young Filipino children
Discourse, policy, and research on early childhood care and development have largely focused on parents—their roles, knowledge, and practices. Yet raising a child is inherently collective and intergenerational. Historical and evolving sociocultural contexts highlight the growing involvement of diverse “significant others” in nurturing young children. This study explores the childcare experiences of Filipino parents during their children’s early y…
From The Lancet to Duterte: How Covid-19 Scientific Articles Figured in Policy and Public Discourse in the Philippines
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, political leaders and public health institutions alike invoked “science” and “evidence” in their responses, and knowledge translation throughout the health crisis has been a vibrant field of scholarship. But how did specific bits of scientific knowledge (e.g., journal articles) find their way to policy and public discourses, traversing different geographic, political, and epistemic registers in the process? Drawi…
‘Saving the youth’: Children and young people as moral subjects in the Philippines’ punitive drug regime
Background The Philippines has one of the must punitive drug regimes in the world, as evidenced not just by Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war but previous anti-drug campaigns. This article examines the place of ‘the youth’ in the longstanding moral panic around drugs and drug policy in the Philippines.Methods This article uses critical discourse analysis to analyze figurations of young people across three distinct periods in the Philippines’ contemporar…
Medical Populism and the Future of Global Health
Populist political leaders around the world have increasingly focused on health issues, promoting anti-scientific agendas, attacking experts, and dramatizing their responses to public health crises. Although Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are prominent examples of this trend of medical populism, it is a flexible, transnational political style that adapts to different national contexts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders of various coun…
Vaccines as populist tropes in the Covid-19 pandemic
With lives, livelihoods, and entire societies at stake, immunisation was as a matter of immense political and social importance throughout the global health crisis. Using the framework of medical populism, this paper articulates the emergence of vaccines for COVID-19 as a populist trope by using three countries with diverse contexts and distinct vaccine responses - Brazil, the Philippines, and the United States - as case studies, drawing on the d…
Drug-free nation: Reconstructing the ‘official drug narratives’ in Singapore and the Philippines
Neither legal nor illegal: Poppers as ‘acceptable’ chemsex drugs among men who have sex with men in the Philippines
Traditional medicine in Filipino patients' therapeutic itineraries
Beyond ‘heightism’ and ‘height premium’: An anthropology and sociology of human stature
This review article examines the meanings and materialities of human stature, from serving as a marker of human difference to shaping the socio‐spatial experiences of individuals. I introduce existing perspectives on height from various disciplines, including biomedical discourses on the factors (e.g. nutrition, genetics) that determine height, economic discourses on how the average heights of populations have changed over time, sociobiological a…
Pharmaceutical messianism and the politics of Covid-19 in the United States
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, public officials in the United States - from the President to governors, mayors, lawmakers, and even school district commissioners - touted unproven treatments for COVID-19 alongside, and sometimes as opposed to, mask and vaccine mandates. Utilising the framework of 'pharmaceutical messianism', our article focuses on three such cures - hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and monoclonal antibodies - to explore how pha…
Pampalibog: Chemsex, desire and pleasure in the Philippines
This article draws from qualitative interviews to provide the first in-depth exploration of reasons for engaging in chemsex in the Philippines. It articulates the many forms that drugs assume as pampalibog, or enhancers of libido, demonstrating the multidimensional pleasures of chemsex along overlapping sensorial and affective planes. By showing the inextricability of the corporeal to the affective, and of the emotional to the erotic, we contend …
Political constructions of people who use drugs in the Philippines: A qualitative content analysis
Overall, these overlapping framings cast people who use drugs simultaneously as victims, criminals, deviants, and sick individuals to the detriment of their security, health, and well-being - and to the retrogression of drug policy in the country
Deciphering a Non-meal: Pantawid-Gutom and the Everyday Negotiation of Hunger in the Philippines
Pantawid-gutom literally means "to bridge hunger" and refers to a range of food and non-food products and practices in the Philippines that allow people to survive in between "serious meals." What does its existence as a liminal category between food/non-food or serious/non-serious meal signify, particularly for millions of Filipino families who regularly experience hunger? Drawing on fieldwork in low-income urban communities on Luzon Island, and…
Sensing, knowing, and making water quality along Marikina River in the Philippines
Water quality is a major concern around the world, but assessments of quality often privilege producers, regulators and experts over consumers. With water supplies and sources constantly in flux, how do ordinary people experience and "sense" quality? How do they define "good" or "good enough" water, and what practices do they engage in to "make" good water? In this article, we attend to these questions by presenting findings from an open-ended qu…
Online qualitative research with vulnerable populations in the Philippines: Ethical and methodological challenges during Covid-19
Our article draws on two multi-sited studies to present the ethical and methodological challenges of conducting online qualitative research among vulnerable populations in the Philippines—specifically, among people who use drugs—during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the global scholarship has long articulated the difficulties inherent to pursuing research on such populations, we show how the specific milieu of the Philippines in the last three year…
Kontra-partido’: Untangling oppositional local politics and healthcare devolution in the Philippines
A long-recognized problem of healthcare devolution in many developing countries is its inextricability from the influences of local politics. This has been particularly self-evident in the Philippines, where, since the adoption of the Local Government Code of 1991, the devolution of health governance, planning, administration and service delivery has placed the health system largely under the control of individual provinces, cities, municipalitie…
Drug testing in Philippine schools: Historical overview and implications for drug policy
Measuring Race and Nation: Pediatric Anthropometry and Child Growth Charts in the Philippines (1909–2008)
Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints is an internationally refereed journal that publishes scholarly articles and other materials on the history of the Philippines and its peoples, both in the homeland and overseas. It believes the past is illuminated by historians as well as scholars from other disciplines; at the same time, it prefers ethnographic approaches to the history of the present. It welcomes works that are theoret…
Taking Flight: Narratives, Logistics, and Risks of Chemsex Scenes in the Philippines
Chemsex - the use of specific, illicit substances to facilitate and enhance sexual encounters - has been documented extensively across the Global North using qualitative methodologies. Elsewhere, however, little is known about the phenomenon. Our article addresses this gap in the scholarly literature by exploring how chemsex encounters transpire in the Philippines. Through semi-structured interviews, we demonstrate the spatiotemporal nature of ch…
Drugs and the Marcos Dictatorship: The Beginnings of the Philippines' Punitive Drug Regime (1970-1975)
This article identifies the early dictatorship of former President Ferdinand Marcos as a significant moment in drug policy in the Philippines, as well as the wider Southeast Asian region. Using methods of critical discourse analysis and the notion of episodic history, it shows how the Marcos government capitalized on the idea of a ‘drug menace’ and narrativized the ideal of ‘discipline’ to justify its authoritarian regime and establish a heavily …
Global Health Interventions: The Military, the Magic Bullet, the Deterministic Model-and Intervention Otherwise
Intervention" is central to global health, but the significance and effects of how intervention is practiced are often taken for granted. This review takes interventions into health and medicine as subjects for ethnographic inquiry. We highlight three lines of anthropological contributions: studies of global health interventions that serve imperial and military objectives, studies of "magic bullet" interventions arising from laboratory science, a…
Not All Citations Are Equal: Reflections from Medical Anthropology in the Philippines
Long before recent calls to decolonize anthropology, practitioners of "national anthropologies"-such as local anthropologists from/in/of the Philippines-have sought to implement a more inclusive kind of scholarship, and this has been reflected in their citational practices. Indeed, a look at the scholarly output of Philippine anthropologists would show a diverse set of citations that feature local scholarship, including those written in Filipino.…
Medical populism
Be your product: On youth, multilevel marketing, and nutritional cure-alls in Puerto Princesa, Philippines
Young people in Puerto Princesa, the Philippines, are drawn to working as salespeople for AIM Global, a purveyor of the nutritional supplement C24/7. The company relies on multilevel marketing, in which sellers recruit other sellers, offering youth not only the chance to earn money but also educational discounts, access to bank cards, and an opportunity to develop do-it-yourself entrepreneurial skills. Trainers encourage sellers to capitalize on …
Categorisation and Minoritisation
The disproportionate mortality of COVID-19 \nand brutality of protective institutions has \nshifted anti-racism \ndiscourses into the mainstream. \n1 Increased reckoning over categorisations \nof people demonstrate that racial \ncategories, while imprecise, fluid, time and \ncontext-specific, \nembody hierarchical power. \nWe interrogate categorisations used in the \nUK, South Africa and the USA; their origins \nand impact. We emphasise needing t…
Global Health Interventions: The Military, the Magic Bullet, the Deterministic Model-and Intervention Otherwise
Intervention" is central to global health, but the significance and effects of how intervention is practiced are often taken for granted. This review takes interventions into health and medicine as subjects for ethnographic inquiry. We highlight three lines of anthropological contributions: studies of global health interventions that serve imperial and military objectives, studies of "magic bullet" interventions arising from laboratory science, a…
Pharmaceutical messianism and the Covid-19 pandemic
(De)constructing 'therapeutic itineraries' of hypertension care: A qualitative study in the Philippines
Hypertension, a major risk factor for non-communicable diseases, remains poorly controlled in many countries. In the Philippines, it is still one of the leading causes of preventable deaths despite the accessibility and availability of essential technologies and medicine to detect and treat hypertension. This paper characterizes the 'therapeutic itineraries' of people with hypertension from poor communities in rural and urban settings in the Phil…
Morality politics: Drug use and the Catholic Church in the Philippines
This article traces the trajectory of the Catholic Church’s discourses on drug use in the Philippines since the first time a statement was made in the 1970s. By drawing on official statements by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), it argues that shifts in emphasis have taken place through the years: the destruction of the youth , attack on human dignity , and then social moral decay . Collectively, they emanate from an inst…
Call Boys: Drug Use and Sex Work Among Marginalized Young Men in a Philippine Port Community
Marginalized young men are a familiar presence in the areas surrounding Philippine ports, selling food and refreshments to the thousands of passengers who come through daily. A closer look, however, reveals that they engage in many other activities as they participate in an informal economy where income opportunities skirt the boundaries between licit and illicit. One job many of them engage in is sex work: as “call boys,” they offer their sexual…
Little Brown Brothers: Height and the Philippine–American Colonial Encounter (1898–1946)
This article looks at how scientific racism, biomedicine, public health, sports, and a nascent bureaucracy intersected in the making of height (human stature) as an important attribute of individuals and populations during the Philippine–American colonial encounter. In relation to the "tall" Americans, Filipinos were depicted and problematized as "short," and the attention to children's growth, the rise of sports, and the establishment of a burea…
De estatura regular: Height and Filipino Bodily Representations during the Spanish Colonial Period (1521–1898)
This article seeks to contribute to the "history of height" in the Philippines by looking at Filipino bodily representations and height differences during the Spanish colonial period. From Pigafetta's account onward, European chroniclers typically described Indios (natives) as having average, varied, or unremarkable height. However, during the nineteenth century a new discourse emerged: that of a short-statured Filipino. Likely the consequence of…
The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) Outbreak in the Philippines in 2003
The global outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) dominated public discourse in the Philippines from March to May 2003. But, given the scale of its impact and the range of responses it elicited, it largely escaped documentation, likely owing to its abbreviated timeframe and the overall lack of scholarly attention to contemporary medical crises. This article reconstructs the "outbreak narrative" of SARS and the perceptions and practi…
Loob’ and ‘labas’: Spatial constructions of safety and risk amid the Covid-19 pandemic in the Philippines
I Think I Have Enough for Now: Living with Covid-19 Antibodies in the Philippines
Drawing on face-to-face and virtual fieldwork in the Philippines, I document the emergence of antibody testing as a popular practice among Filipinos during the COVID-19 pandemic, helping them make decisions about vaccines and other life choices. Antibodies gave people a sense of agency and control amid a health crisis for which political and medical authorities failed to offer certainty and hope, particularly at a time of vaccine scarcity and vir…
Doing' hypertension: Experiential knowledge and practice in the self-management of 'high blood' in the Philippines
Patients' embodied experiences do not always correspond to the biomedical concepts of particular diseases. Drawing from year-long fieldwork in the Philippines that involved semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and digital diaries, we examine how individuals 'do' hypertension through their embodied experiences and the knowledge and practice that emerge from them. Drawing inspiration from Annemarie Mol's work on the notion of 'multip…
Measuring Race and Nation: Pediatric Anthropometry and Child Growth Charts in the Philippines (1909–2008)
Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints is an internationally refereed journal that publishes scholarly articles and other materials on the history of the Philippines and its peoples, both in the homeland and overseas. It believes the past is illuminated by historians as well as scholars from other disciplines; at the same time, it prefers ethnographic approaches to the history of the present. It welcomes works that are theoret…
Taking Flight: Narratives, Logistics, and Risks of Chemsex Scenes in the Philippines
Chemsex - the use of specific, illicit substances to facilitate and enhance sexual encounters - has been documented extensively across the Global North using qualitative methodologies. Elsewhere, however, little is known about the phenomenon. Our article addresses this gap in the scholarly literature by exploring how chemsex encounters transpire in the Philippines. Through semi-structured interviews, we demonstrate the spatiotemporal nature of ch…
Drugs and the Marcos Dictatorship: The Beginnings of the Philippines' Punitive Drug Regime (1970-1975)
This article identifies the early dictatorship of former President Ferdinand Marcos as a significant moment in drug policy in the Philippines, as well as the wider Southeast Asian region. Using methods of critical discourse analysis and the notion of episodic history, it shows how the Marcos government capitalized on the idea of a ‘drug menace’ and narrativized the ideal of ‘discipline’ to justify its authoritarian regime and establish a heavily …
Not All Citations Are Equal: Reflections from Medical Anthropology in the Philippines
Long before recent calls to decolonize anthropology, practitioners of "national anthropologies"-such as local anthropologists from/in/of the Philippines-have sought to implement a more inclusive kind of scholarship, and this has been reflected in their citational practices. Indeed, a look at the scholarly output of Philippine anthropologists would show a diverse set of citations that feature local scholarship, including those written in Filipino.…
Anthropology, Democracy, and Authoritarianism: Reflections from Brazil and the Philippines
This article examines the challenges that the right-wing populist governments in Brazil and the Philippines pose to anthropological practices as a way of discussing the responses and responsibilities of anthropologists vis-à-vis situations of growing authoritarianism across the globe. It explores the importance of public and political engagement for the national anthropologies that have developed in Brazil and the Philippines and stresses their c…
Pampagilas: Methamphetamine in the everyday economic lives of underclass male youths in a Philippine port
Kalaban: Young drug users’ engagements with law enforcement in the Philippines
Call Boys: Drug Use and Sex Work Among Marginalized Young Men in a Philippine Port Community
Marginalized young men are a familiar presence in the areas surrounding Philippine ports, selling food and refreshments to the thousands of passengers who come through daily. A closer look, however, reveals that they engage in many other activities as they participate in an informal economy where income opportunities skirt the boundaries between licit and illicit. One job many of them engage in is sex work: as “call boys,” they offer their sexual…
Little Brown Brothers: Height and the Philippine–American Colonial Encounter (1898–1946)
This article looks at how scientific racism, biomedicine, public health, sports, and a nascent bureaucracy intersected in the making of height (human stature) as an important attribute of individuals and populations during the Philippine–American colonial encounter. In relation to the "tall" Americans, Filipinos were depicted and problematized as "short," and the attention to children's growth, the rise of sports, and the establishment of a burea…
"They might mistake you for an "informant
This article is a reflection on doing anthropology in the Philippines amid the government's punitive antidrug campaign and on the impact of ethnographic research on public discourses on drugs. Using my own ethnographic research as a starting point, I outline how a journal article I published about the lived experiences of young men who use drugs took on renewed significance years later, in a different policy regime. I then outline a research agen…
Medical populism and immunisation programmes: Illustrative examples and consequences for public health
Various factors have been implicated in vaccine hesitancy and loss of vaccine confidence, but the specific ways and particular moments in which immunisation programmes and vaccine scares are politicised, exacerbating negative attitudes about vaccines and leading to retrogressive policies, have been relatively under-examined. This paper applies the concept of 'medical populism' [Lasco, G., & Curato, N. (2019). Medical populism. Social Science & Me…
Medical populism
Be your product: On youth, multilevel marketing, and nutritional cure-alls in Puerto Princesa, Philippines
Young people in Puerto Princesa, the Philippines, are drawn to working as salespeople for AIM Global, a purveyor of the nutritional supplement C24/7. The company relies on multilevel marketing, in which sellers recruit other sellers, offering youth not only the chance to earn money but also educational discounts, access to bank cards, and an opportunity to develop do-it-yourself entrepreneurial skills. Trainers encourage sellers to capitalize on …
Nasa dugo (‘It’s in the blood’): Lay conceptions of hypertension in the Philippines
INTRODUCTION: Understanding explanatory models is important for hypertension, a leading risk factor for cardiovascular disease and stroke. This article aims to determine what adult patients with hypertension in the Philippines attribute their condition to, how these views might be explained and what the implications are for hypertension management. METHODS: This is a qualitative study drawing on 71 semistructured interviews (40 initial and 31 fol…
Medical populism and the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper uses the vocabulary of 'medical populism' to identify and analyse the political constructions of (and responses to) the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, the Philippines, and the United States from January to mid-July 2020, particularly by the countries' heads of state: Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, and Donald Trump. In all three countries, the leaders' responses to the outbreak can be characterised by the following features: simplifying…
Keeping up with the times: Skin-lightening practices among young men in the Philippines
The desire for light(er) skin is widespread around the world and has been the subject of extensive critical scholarship. But far less attention has focused on skin-lightening practices among boys and men, even as historical and contemporary data show that it is both a long-standing and growing trend in many Asian countries. This study builds on a focused ethnography of young men’s skin-lightening practices in two Philippine cities. Using Norbert …
Drugs and drug wars as populist tropes in Asia: Illustrative examples and implications for drug policy
De estatura regular: Height and Filipino Bodily Representations during the Spanish Colonial Period (1521–1898)
This article seeks to contribute to the "history of height" in the Philippines by looking at Filipino bodily representations and height differences during the Spanish colonial period. From Pigafetta's account onward, European chroniclers typically described Indios (natives) as having average, varied, or unremarkable height. However, during the nineteenth century a new discourse emerged: that of a short-statured Filipino. Likely the consequence of…
Morality politics: Drug use and the Catholic Church in the Philippines
This article traces the trajectory of the Catholic Church’s discourses on drug use in the Philippines since the first time a statement was made in the 1970s. By drawing on official statements by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), it argues that shifts in emphasis have taken place through the years: the destruction of the youth , attack on human dignity , and then social moral decay . Collectively, they emanate from an inst…
The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) Outbreak in the Philippines in 2003
The global outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) dominated public discourse in the Philippines from March to May 2003. But, given the scale of its impact and the range of responses it elicited, it largely escaped documentation, likely owing to its abbreviated timeframe and the overall lack of scholarly attention to contemporary medical crises. This article reconstructs the "outbreak narrative" of SARS and the perceptions and practi…
Categorisation and Minoritisation
The disproportionate mortality of COVID-19 \nand brutality of protective institutions has \nshifted anti-racism \ndiscourses into the mainstream. \n1 Increased reckoning over categorisations \nof people demonstrate that racial \ncategories, while imprecise, fluid, time and \ncontext-specific, \nembody hierarchical power. \nWe interrogate categorisations used in the \nUK, South Africa and the USA; their origins \nand impact. We emphasise needing t…
Communicating Covid-19 vaccines: Lessons from the dengue vaccine controversy in the Philippines
box In 2016, the Philippines embarked on an unprecedented mass immunisation campaign against dengue fever, becoming the first Asian nation to authorise the commercial use of Dengvaxia, the dengue vaccine manufactured by the French pharmaceutical Sanofi Pasteur.1 In December 2017, nearly 2 years since the campaign started, Sanofi announced that Dengvaxia may actually cause ‘more severe disease’ in those who have not had previous dengue infection.2…
‘ Hawa ’ and ‘ resistensiya ’: Local health knowledge and the Covid-19 pandemic in the Philippines
Policies and communications efforts should acknowledge and anticipate how these notions may serve as either barriers or facilitators to participatory care and improved health outcomes
Medical populism and the politics of dengue epidemics in the Global South
With millions of cases and thousands of deaths every year in Asia and Latin America, dengue fever continues to be of global public health significance. This article uses the concept of 'medical populism' to analyse the political construction of the 2019 dengue epidemics in Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Honduras. Through this framework, we examine the narratives of these outbreaks by reconstructing how political actors simplified the discourse,…
Shabu is different”: Extrajudicial killings, death penalty, and ‘methamphetamine exceptionalism’ in the Philippines
Strong structuration analysis of patterns of adherence to hypertension medication
Achieving blood pressure control is among the highest priorities for reducing the burden of cardiovascular diseases globally. Control is poor in the Philippines, especially in socioeconomically marginalised communities. This paper explores long-term adherence to anti-hypertensive medication in these communities, identifying 4 distinct medication adherence patterns. We draw on Strong Structuration Theory to explore motivations of action for those …
Loob’ and ‘labas’: Spatial constructions of safety and risk amid the Covid-19 pandemic in the Philippines
Anthropological Responses to Covid-19 in the Philippines
This article reflects on the roles anthropologists have played in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, and identifies the challenges – from the methodological to the political – they faced in fulfilling these roles. Drawing on the author’s personal and professional experiences in the country, as well as on interviews with other anthropologists, this article identifies three major roles for anthropologists: conducting ethnograph…
I Think I Have Enough for Now: Living with Covid-19 Antibodies in the Philippines
Drawing on face-to-face and virtual fieldwork in the Philippines, I document the emergence of antibody testing as a popular practice among Filipinos during the COVID-19 pandemic, helping them make decisions about vaccines and other life choices. Antibodies gave people a sense of agency and control amid a health crisis for which political and medical authorities failed to offer certainty and hope, particularly at a time of vaccine scarcity and vir…
(De)constructing 'therapeutic itineraries' of hypertension care: A qualitative study in the Philippines
Hypertension, a major risk factor for non-communicable diseases, remains poorly controlled in many countries. In the Philippines, it is still one of the leading causes of preventable deaths despite the accessibility and availability of essential technologies and medicine to detect and treat hypertension. This paper characterizes the 'therapeutic itineraries' of people with hypertension from poor communities in rural and urban settings in the Phil…
Sociology (40 works) · Political science (39 works) · Law (26 works) · Medicine (26 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (23 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Public health (13 works) · Social science (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works)