From social lives to playing fields: ‘the Chinese antimalarial’ as artemisnin monotherapy, artemisinin combination therapy and qinghao juice

Abstract

With the tenth anniversary of the landmark publication Social Lives of Medicines (Whyte, van der Geest, and Hardon 2003), new avenues arise for exploring the ‘thinginess of things’ (Latour 2000). This paper, based on fieldwork carried out between 2001 and 2008, discusses how ‘the Chinese antimalarial’ as an over-the-counter medicine in petty enterprise clinics of East Africa became a biotechnological bulk item for Chinese import-export traders in a highly subsidised antimalarial health field after the WHO recommendations of 2005 and 2006. These observations are put in perspective with reflections on a practical engagement with the plant itself, i.e. Artemisia annua L. Rather than taking an ‘ego-centred’ and transactionalist viewpoint that follows the drug through a string of ‘regimes of value’ (Appadurai 1986), this paper underlines that a thing's thinginess is ontologically constitutive of its playing fields.