THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Laura Meek
Fugitive Science : Chakachua (Fake) Pharmaceuticals and Embodied Knowledge in Tanzania
Friday 13 November 2020, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
Regulated pharmaceuticals are readily available for over-the-counter purchase throughout Tanzania, with between 30-60% of these drugs estimated to be fake. Global health policymakers decry this situation as dangerous and disordered as if no rules govern the use of biomedicine in Africa. In this talk, Dr. Meek challenges such framings by demonstrating the innovative practices employed by medical personnel and lay people to determine the various qualities of drugs. She conceptualizes these practices as methods of 'fugitive science', simultaneously forms of knowledge production and postcolonial critique. Meek argues that this material forces us to reconsider global health assumptions about the so-called 'overuse' or 'misuse' of pharmaceuticals in the Global South.
Laura Meek is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. She is a medical anthropologist who researches medical globalization, bodily epistemologies, and the politics of healing in East Africa.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Leilah Vevaina
To Hong Kong and Back Again: Building Bombay and Rebuilding Mumbai
Friday 16 October 2020, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians), a micro-minority, are well-known in Mumbai for their philanthropic giving. The community in the city, through its ties to shipbuilding, and the tea trade, has had a sustained relationship with Hong Kong. This paper wishes to show how these nineteenth-century trade profits were invested in urban real estate and in recent years have seen a resurgence of funds transferred from Parsi charitable trusts in Hong Kong back to Mumbai, helping to connect the two cities.
Leilah Vevaina is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the New School for Social Research in 2015. She has an MA in Anthropology from The New School (2007) as well as an MA in Social Thought from New York University (2005). Her research lies in the intersection of urban property and religious life within the legal regimes of contemporary India. She has conducted fieldwork in Mumbai, India, and Hong Kong, with specific focus on the Indian Zoroastrian, or Parsi community.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Tung-Yi Kho
In Search of the Good Life in Contemporary China: Stories from Shenzhen
Friday 26 June 2020, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
What makes a good life in China today? In the past thirty-plus years, China sustained a historically unprecedented economic growth rate that averaged roughly 10% annually, lifting over 800 million of its population out of poverty. In line with these trends, urbanization proceeded apace throughout the country, precipitated by large-scale rural-urban migration. Such radical economic and demographic transformation of an historically agrarian civilisation has led to talk of a civilisation-switch that has been widely hailed as a success-story. But have these coeval meta-level processes of modernization, implied by economic progress, yielded the good life?
Shenzhen was Kho's field-site of choice for 24 months of ethnographic research because it was the PRC's first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and, also, its most successful. His interlocutors were all rural-migrants who had come to Shenzhen in search of the supposedly good life. Did they find it? His research sought to find out and in the process, shedding light on the nature of modernity and our prospects of attaining the good life within it.
Tung-Yi Kho is an adjunct professor in CUHK's Department of Anthropology and a scholar of modern China, with PhDs in Social Anthropology (SOAS) and in Cultural Studies (Lingnan University).
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
(Cancelled)
An Anthropological Talk by Laura Meek
Fugitive Science: Chakachua (Fake) Pharmaceuticals and Embodied Knowledge in Tanzania
Friday 20 March 2020, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
Regulated pharmaceuticals are readily available for over-the-counter purchase throughout Tanzania, with between 30-60% of these drugs estimated to be fake. Global health policymakers decry this situation as dangerous and disordered, as if no rules govern the use of biomedicine in Africa. In this talk, I challenge such framings by demonstrating the innovative practices employed by medical personnel and lay people to determine the various qualities of drugs. I conceptualize these practices as methods of 'fugitive science', simultaneously forms of knowledge production and postcolonial critique. I argue that this material forces us to reconsider global health assumptions about the so-called 'overuse' or 'misuse' of pharmaceuticals in the Global South.
Laura Meek is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. She is a medical anthropologist who researches biomedical globalization, bodily epistemologies, and the politics of healing in East Africa.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Chaung Wing-yee, Gloria
Slow Media in the Viral Age: Urban Renewal and Community Organization in Hong Kong
Friday 17 January 2020, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
"Wedding Card Street" is what a number of people will think of if we are to talk about urban renewal in Hong Kong. Since the redevelopment of Lee Tung Street, there have been numerous urban renewal projects going on. How is gentrification experienced and lived? This talk is about an ethnographic study of how "gentrification" is experienced, lived, talked about, and "mediated" by local residents, shopkeepers in old districts of Hong Kong and a local concern group, an old district autonomy advancement group. This group of people, with their conscious, participatory, reflexive and creative "slow media" practice, showed that media can be an artistic creation, that its life, from its production/generation to circulation(s), can "weave" imaginations into reality.
Chaung Wing-yee Gloria, is a Mphil student and undergraduate in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.