Acknowledging the 2015 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology

Abstract

Acknowledging the 2015 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology KRISTIN PETERSON University of California I am exceptionally pleased and deeply honored to accept the Anthony Leeds Prize from the Society of Urban, National, and Transnational/ Global Anthropology. SUNTA has long honored essential work in the study of urbanscapes, political economy, poverty, global capital, and transnationalism. For Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2014) to be recognized among such stellar ethnographies is a real privilege. Former Leeds Prize awarded books have been recognized for new ana- lytical insights, creative modes of representation, and imaginative con- ceptual terrains. Inspired by much of these works and others, Speculative Markets attempts to ethnographically capture the impetus of pharmaceu- tical capital across Nigerian and transcontinental markets. Grounding the ethnography in Lagos, Nigeria, I focus on drug distribution systems to theorize a market that has been shaped by multiple forces since the 1960s: the Nigerian Civil War, changes in US monetary policy, the turn to speculative capital in the pharmaceutical industry, structural adjust- ment programs administered in African countries, and the immense transformation of urban topologies in Africa’s largest city. What started as a robust, highly profitable pharmaceutical market in the 1970s, ulti- mately crashed in the 1990s and transformed into one that is now home to only a few drug classes of low quality, including a substantial number of fake (intentionally falsified) drugs. The book attempts to account for these dramatic transformations that occurred in a relatively short period of time. Capturing the multiple politics, market dynamics, and changing contours of the city required constructing a multi-scalar ethnography that could thoroughly link the disparate micro ethnographic sphere with a macro political economy. On the one hand, this was relatively easy to do because my interlocutors in Lagos regularly characterized their lives and businesses by indexing Nigerian history and regional market politics in Asia and the Middle East. Thus, I was pushed me to consider the market and Lagos itself as local, regional, and transnational all at once. On the other hand, it was challenging to represent in writing how multiple events happening at dis- parate times converged to give rise to a new transcontinental organiza- tion of pharmaceuticals. These dramatic changes meant that both multinational drug compa- nies and Nigerian pharmaceutical traders faced new market volatilities effecting drug distribution from Asia to West Africa. Indian and Chinese manufacturers are the largest suppliers of pharmaceuticals destined for the Lagos-based, wholesale market, Idumota, which is the main market C 2016 by the American City & Society, Vol. 28, Issue 1, pp. 6–7, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. V Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/ciso.12076.