2017 Volume 81 Issue 4 Pages 614-631
Since the 17th century, historians and philosophers of science have thoroughly documented the powerful influence of public scientific experiments and how they have been mediating between human a airs and the production and management of things in Europe. Anthropologists and sociologists, on the other hand, added important new insights to this line of research by exploring the ways experimentation creates its own worlds, collectives and divisions. Authors who highlight the inclusion of lay people and values in the conduct of scientific research often regard this constellation as a new regime of knowledge production that goes beyond the laboratory. My aim in this paper is to direct such important epistemological insights about knowing nature back to the issue of experimentation, which, as I will argue, is both a method and the world that is being shaped. I will explore how Japanese medicines and Hungarian bodies become enmeshed in each other through care, experiment, and comparison in a way that I term the “worlding of the metabolism.” Following anthropologist Mei Zhan, I contend that the metabolic body “needs to be ‘worlded’—made visible and thinkable rather than concealed and ‘banished to the earth’—through cultural analysis and as cultural analysis.” I use metabolic circuits here as a metaphor not of our interconnected world but rather through the conduct of an ethnographic experiment. The ethnographic focus of the article is DRC, a small clinical trial center in western Hungary. Through a unique collaboration with family doctors within a 70-km radius of the center, the DRC can provide a large pool of patients with otherwise limited access to specialized treatment of chronic conditions such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, making it an ideal location for outcome studies that compare the effectiveness of two different therapies. Among the many difficulties of conducting long-term outcome studies that focus on chronic diseases, one of the most perplexing is that of coordinating the strict methodological imperatives of clinical research with the more fluid reality of outpatient care that participants receive at their family doctors. (View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)
