Trusting medicines The social embeddedness of everyday medicine use in Maputo, Mozambique

As a result of pharmaceuticalisation processes, people worldwide have become increasingly reliant on medicines to manage a variety of ill-health and bodily conditions in their everyday lives. Despite disparities in terms of access and consumption, especially between so-called global North and global South settings, medicines are widely appreciated and sought after not only as a form of (self-)care, but also as therapeutic and technological tools for well-being, performative and enhancement purposes. In this thesis, I analyse the various meanings and roles that medicines in general, and pharmaceuticals in particular, play in individuals’ everyday lives in Maputo, capital of Mozambique – a context where insufficiencies in healthcare services, and in the public sector provision of essential drugs, occur alongside a growing private pharmaceutical market. Focusing on users’ experiences and the practical reasoning behind different modalities of use, I pay particular attention to the interplay between individuals’ agency and social structures, as well as between local dynamics and global processes in everyday medicine use. Having Maputo’s (unevenly distributed and accessible)therapeutic landscape as an empirical background, and following a more critical approach to rationalities in medicine use that goes beyond dichotomous approaches to ‘rational’ versus ‘irrational’ forms of usage, I show how therapeutic and medicine use processes are not only strongly based on structural and circumstantial factors and dynamics, but also on relational and socially embedded contexts of (dis)trust.