The temporary as the future: Ready‐to‐use therapeutic food and nutraceuticals in South Africa |
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| Authors: | MICHELLE PENTECOST THOMAS COUSINS |
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| Institution: | 1. Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Kings College London. She is a physician‐anthropologist with current research interests in postgenomics and global health in Africa.;2. Clarendon‐Lienhardt Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. His research focuses on the relationships between health, labour and kinship in South Africa. |
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| Abstract: | The reconfiguration of food as a pharmaceutical in biomedical regimes has been considered by scholars along two axes: (1) food supplementation as humanitarian intervention, based on a specific value of life and delivered in ‘crisis’ situations with a short temporal horizon; (2) food supplementation as commodity, marketed as enhancing ‘wellness’ or potential, based on notions of risk in broad temporal frames. We consider nutraceuticals and ready‐to‐use‐therapeutic foods as they are deployed by state and commercial actors in South Africa in relation to two key figures: the pregnant woman and the HIV‐positive population. These biopolitical expressions of post‐apartheid regimes of knowledge, care and governance reveal how state distribution and the corporate marketing of supplements employ a future‐oriented logic that appeals to notions of power, energy and potential. Therapeutic foods in this context are thus not merely humanitarian technologies that reconfigure crisis as a chronic condition – the temporary becoming permanent – but are premised on new potentialities, in which the temporary may (re)shape the future. |
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