Gabrielle Robbins

GABRIELLE ROBBINS, then a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was awarded funding in August 2020 to aid research on “Artemisia’s Industry: Between Farm and Factory in the Making of African Pharmaceuticals,” supervised by Dr. Christine Walley. Retitled ‘Artemisia’s Industry: #MadeInMadagascar Pharmaceuticals Between Farm and Factory,’ this project uses multi-methods ethnographic research to understand how plant-based drugs became pivotal to Madagascar’s pandemic response. It examines how Artemisia annua, a medicinal herb, was previously grown on the island as raw materials for antimalarial drug ingredients; how artemisia became a pandemic-era therapeutic resource of global interest; and how its cultivation and processing were mobilized for nationalist crisis response that rejected dependence on Euro-American Big Pharma. Contra analytical emphases on ‘global pharmaceuticals,’ attention here focuses on local, regional, and national ‘farm pharma’ projects fueling new kinds of medical protectionism. Integrating remote and in-person research across Madagascar, Europe, and the U.S., this project contributes novel methodological tools for the anthropology of medicine/pharmaceuticals at the same time as it interrogates how Covid-19 potently reworked operant geographies of medical manufacture and distribution.