Doctoral Dissertation Research: Translation, Scientization, and Branding in Medical Markets

Natural products, broadly sourced from plants and animal parts, are consumed worldwide to enhance general health and well-being. A lucrative industry that manufactures and sells natural products as medicines and dietary supplements increasingly relies on scientific evidence of these products’ medical effectiveness as communicated by medical professionals, scientists, marketers, and government agencies in official reports and routine conversations.

This linguistic anthropological dissertation project investigates how scientific research on the effectiveness of natural products is translated into everyday language to market their therapeutic properties. Research findings will be disseminated to medical professionals in the pharmaceutical industry, scientific academies, government agencies, and NGOs who seek to educate about scientific literacy to help the public make informed decisions about the consumption of natural products.

The research will further aid policy makers in introducing and regulating natural products in national health care systems.

The research investigate how scientific terminologies and language are used to brand natural products as effective medicine and communicate their value in different national and global medical markets. The researcher will carry out linguistic and ethnographic research in farms, laboratories, and marketplaces where natural products are cultivated, manufactured, studied, and marketed to consumers.

Using the methods of participant observation to study work activities, semi-structured interviews, analyzing scientific papers, and media and archival research, the researcher will examine how networks between the government, the farming industry, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and consumers facilitate communication about the scientific properties of natural products. The results of this research will contribute to anthropological theories about science’s role in shaping social institutions, government, and global markets, by providing empirical data on the use of language in creating scientific evidence.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.