Circulation and Governance of Asian Medicine ed. by Céline Coderey and Laurent Pordié (review)

It is surely one of the paradoxes of medical anthropology that the industrial expansion of Asian medicines—a phenomenon of global scale and relevance by any measure— has coincided with a diminishing academic interest in Asian medicines, as the discipline at large has shifted its focus to mainly biomedical topics during the recent decades (Scherz 2018). Yet while research on Asian medicines may not have increased in quantity, it has certainly gained in quality, with a steady stream of important publications carrying forward—and, crucially, rethinking—Charles Leslie’s field-defining legacy (Leslie 1976). Céline Coderey and Laurent Pordié’s Circulation and Governance of Asian Medicine, the product of a multidisciplinary workshop in September 2015 at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, is the latest appearance in this venerable line of edited volumes. It identifies circulation and governance as the two central practices that today shape and transform industrial Asian medicines, and explores their relationship with the aim of revealing the fluid and multiple nature of Asian medicines as mobile commodities.

Like many of its predecessors (e.g., Alter 2005; Connor and Samuel 2001; Ernst 2002), Circulation and Governance does not revolutionize the field as much as it incrementally advances it. It does so by updating and combining three of the most important strands of inquiry in recent research on Asian medicines. First and most fundamental, it participates in the ongoing reframing of Asian medicines as industries (e.g., Kloos 2017; Kloos et al. 2019; Pordié and Gaudillière 2014a; Pordié and Hardon 2015) rather than as cultural or epistemic systems, adding substantial material and weight to this approach. Second, the volume provides a crucial and so far not sufficiently developed dimension to research on Asian medicines’ regulation regimes (e.g., Adams 2002; Craig 2011; Saxer 2012), namely, their reciprocal relationship with the circulation of herbal pharmaceutical products. Indeed, the book’s key point is precisely that neither the governance nor the circulation of Asian medicines can be understood in isolation from the other. Third, the topic of circulation directly connects to previous work on globalization, most notably Joseph Alter’s edited volume Asian Medicine and Globalization (Alter 2005). Yet where Alter and his contributors focused on flows of knowledge and the tension between nationalism and transnationalism, and framed their inquiry in terms of culture, this volume deals mostly with pharmaceutical objects and the mutual relationship of governance and circulation, and situates its analytic in the domains of policies and the market.

Circulation and Governance consists of an introduction, seven chapters, and a short afterword, moving in emphasis from governance (chaps. 1–4) to circulation (chap. 5– 7), and from diachronic analyses (chaps. 1–5) to synchronic ones (chap. 6–7). The introduction situates the book’s topic within a limited selection of literature on Asian medicines, but does justice neither to the state of the art of research, nor to the chapters that follow. Thus, the statement that Asian pharmaceuticals and their regulation should be considered as assemblages might have productively engaged with the “pharmaceutical assemblage” (Kloos 2017); the discussion of state power and biopower could have benefitted from recent work on Asian medicines’ recognition and integration into national health systems (e.g., Blaikie 2016, 2019; Lei 2014); and the framing of pharmaceutical regulation as inherently antagonistic to Asian medicines may have been reconsidered in light of recent studies (including the chapters in this volume) suggesting a more complex picture (e.g., Cuomu forthcoming; Kloos et al. 2019; Saxer 2012). The domain of intellectual property—crucial to both circulation and regulation of Asian medicines—is hardly mentioned at all (e.g., Cullet and Raja 2004; Gaudillière 2014; Madhavan 2017; Pordié 2008).

Similarly, the identification of cross-cutting themes does little justice to the comparative and synergetic potential of the chapters. While the theme of biomedical governance is obvious but hardly new, “the power of invisible ingredients” appears as a tangent...