Centre for South Asian Studies

Research interests

Stefan Ecks co-founded Edinburgh University’s Medical Anthropology programme. He did ethnographic fieldwork in India, Nepal, Myanmar, and the UK. Recent work focuses on an embodied theory of value, global pharmaceutical markets, changing ideas of depression, poverty and access to healthcare, and relations between multimorbidity and chronic medication use. Publications include Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India (New York University Press, 2013), Living Worth: Value and Values in Global Pharmaceutical Markets (Duke University Press, 2022), as well as many journal articles on the intersections between health and economics.

Research interests include Medical Anthropology, Medical pluralism, Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals, Anthropology of food, Transcultural psychiatry.