The Indian pharmaceutical industry has historically manufactured low-cost drugs for the global poor. Activist mobilizations at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic revealed a vast cost gap between global brands and Indian generics, much to the embarrassment of EuroAmerican corporations that were in the habit of pricing drugs for only the wealthy or well insured. As new drug access controversies focus on anticancer therapies, they reveal new flows of international capital, emergent genetic technologies, and increasingly coercive trade regimes. Together these favor multi-national corporate oligopolies, which imperil the legacy of HIV/AIDS activism and the future availability of essential life-saving drugs for the work of global public health. In this essay, I describe how the future of the right to drug access rests uneasily, and potentially calamitously, on a shifting balance of power between global south interests and Euro-American pharmaceutical capital.

This analysis lays a framework for greater collaboration between the cancer community and social scientists in both research and policy. We argue that the growing cancer burden that low- and middle-income countries face is raising social, political, and economic challenges of global cancer that require interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional biomedical-clinical nexus. First, we briefly review some of the most important existing social science studies that have addressed cancer in low- and middle-income countries, including the main methods, approaches, and findings of this research. Second, we give an overview of recent interdisciplinary collaborations between social scientists and oncologists and demonstrate how qualitative research can help us to understand the distinct challenges of cancer care in low- and middle-income settings. Finally, we identify key areas for future collaboration and suggest possible paths forward for cancer research and policy that involve social science.

No abstract

This chapter enters a neglected corner of Gandhi's political thought—his preoccupation with blood. Here, blood indexed a past and present colonial violence, as well as the future possibility for an ascetic transcendence of both politics and the body. The chapter then goes on to discuss how past, present, and future bloodsheds are evoked simultaneously in the iconography of fallen freedom-fighter martyrs. In this genre, heroes of India's independence struggle who shed their blood for the nation are depicted in portraits composed of human blood in the present. This aimed to inspire others to willingness to shed their blood, and that of others, in the future for the nation.

Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of one, where donated human blood critiques others' unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic relations between the given and not-given.