ADI Lunch Lecture - Ayo Wahlberg

ADI lunch lectures: En gang om måneden lægger NIAS lokale til en forelæsning om Asien. Den 17. marts vil Ayo Wahlberg, Postdoc, Institut for Antropologi, give en forelæsning om:

Family secrets and the industrialisation of herbal medicine in Viet Nam

In 1955, the Vietnamese government launched a national programme to ‘resuscitate traditional medicine' which continues to this day. This has included botanical expeditions to collect and record medicinal plant species as identified by various village practitioners, efforts to modernise valuable traditional remedies and regulatory initiatives to integrate traditional medicine into the national health delivery system. This paper maps out the industrialisation route followed by one particular traditional herbal remedy in the 1990s as herbalists, chemists, pharmacologists and clinicians collaborated to, on the one hand, standardise its production through phytochemical analysis, and on the other, demonstrate its efficacy through clinical trials. In doing so, it is shown how tensions between superstition and reason, quackery and competence as well as the natural and the toxic disarm classic East/West and modern/traditional dichotomies.

Formålet med ADI lunch lectures er at give smagsprøver på den mangfoldige Asienforskning, der finder sted på Københavns Universitet, og dermed åbne op for muligheder for nye samarbejder på tværs af discipliner og regioner.

Fremtidige forelæsninger

Forelæsningerne og efterfølgende diskussion finder sted den tredje onsdag hver måned fra kl. 12.15-13.30 på:

NIAS - Nordisk Institut for Asienstudier
Leifsgade 33, 3. sal
2300 København S

Medbring evt. frokost - ADI sørger for en lille bid.