The Making and Unmaking of a New Biosocial Subject

This chapter examines the adoption of traditional wisdom into modern pharmaceutical development, one of the most recent movements surrounding ‘pharmaceuticalisation’ in South Asia. A common belief is that intellectual property rights prevent the misappropriation of local people's knowledge and counter the hegemony of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. However, several social scientists have criticised it as a new form of biocapitalism. This chapter responds to such criticism by ethnographically exploring the state government's project that registers ‘valuable’ folk Ayurveda and vaidyas as its ‘legitimate owners’ in Uttarakhand, a rural north Indian state. We reveal the parts where inclusion and exclusion occur. It showed how vaidyas’ expression of knowledge sharing as a form of sevā (service) were excluded by the ‘legitimate benefit-sharing’ project assumption based on the global intellectual property right model. Based on our ethnographic analysis, we conclude that we can find alternative ‘well-being’ possibilities emerging from the concept of biocapitalism. This can be done by highlighting the experiences of the people who were excluded from the project

Biosocial theory · Criticism · Environmental ethics · Ethnography · Hegemony · Intellectual property · Law and economics · Misappropriation · Multinational corporation · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology