The Social Life of a Hybrid

I employ two central concepts derived from science, technology, and society (STS), namely classification and the social life of objects, to focus on the classi­fications and trajectories of health foods and the social processes they undergo.

Classification is almost always a political practice that is embedded in our daily lives, and the process is so natural that most people are not consciously aware of it. The classification process can be regarded as “naturalization” that “strip[s] away the contingencies of an object’s creation and its situated nature”

Effective Health Foods, Ineffective Drugs 205 (p. 299).^[744] Classification also encounters resistance arising from the coexist­ence of multiple created identities. The multiplicity of identities blurs category boundaries, generating a “borderland” where an object has difficulty being classified. Multiple concepts, such as “boundary objects”^[745] and “monsters,”^[746] have been proposed for describing the interaction and politics of identities and categories.

I use a more general term, “hybrid,” to cover the concepts of both boundary objects and monsters. Hybrid refers to an object with memberships in multiple categories. A hybrid is inevitably cultivated in a borderland, and the classifica­tion of a hybrid is so problematic that a resistance to naturalization is often encountered.^[747] Hybrids also have a “plastic” nature that allows them “to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them.”^[748] Therefore, a hybrid dynamically outlines the boundaries and differentiates the membership, creating experiences of anomalies in practice.

Health food is a hybrid that obscures the boundary between food and drug. This causes issues for regulatory frameworks that are primarily established on the basis of the differences between a food and a drug.

their identity shifts, and they can further cross boundaries. The tournaments of value from various communities thus define the social classification of objects.

The key to connecting the classification of a commodity with its value is knowledge. As objects flow through a community, knowledge regarding their production or consumption is distributed, and classification stands at the core of knowledge production. The concept from classification through knowledge to commodity provides a conceptual framework for further discussion of cat­egories of foods and drugs and the borderland between them.

Classification systems are deeply embedded as infrastructure in clinical tri­als for pharmaceutical products.^[750] The primary objective of such studies, the gold standard of which is the double-blind randomized controlled trial, is to prove the effectiveness of a drug. However, the effectiveness of a drug is highly sensitive to its classification.

From this broad perspective, the categories of foods and drugs can be regarded as being on a continuum, with safety and effectiveness being the distinguishing features of the food and drug ends of the spectrum, respectively. Regulators and manufacturers emphasize the safety of foods but stress the effectiveness of drugs; this delineates the boundary of the two categories. However, safety and effectiveness are not mutually exclusive. A pharmaceutical trial cannot be con­ducted without the safety of the drug first being proven. Moreover, ordinary foods can become health foods or functional foods if they are confirmed to have health effects. Therefore, the clear-cut boundary between foods and drugs is more akin to a traditional artifact, and safety and effectiveness alone are not sufficient for defining and justifying the current regulatory system.

To elaborate on how the circulation and exchange of an object shapes the knowledge and regulations rooted in the borderland between categories, I documented the social life of glucosamine products in Taiwan. Not every country or region regulates glucosamine products as drugs; for example, glu­cosamine products are considered drugs in Europe but foods in the United States. Following a scientific review by the TFDA, glucosamine products in Taiwan could be classified as foods or drugs depending on their ingredients.

Effective Health Foods, Ineffective Drugs 207 made with glucosamine sulfate in the world. First, to examine the production of knowledge on the medical effectiveness of glucosamine products, the Pub­Med database was searched for studies by using the keywords “glucosamine” and “osteoarthritis” under the category of “clinical trial.” Second, to investigate the social life of Viartril-S in Taiwan, I searched Taiwan’s largest online news database, that established by United Daily News, for newspaper articles con­taining the keywords of “glucosamine,” “Wei-Gu-Li,” the Chinese

brand name of Viartril-S), and “arthritis.” Third, I searched Google by using the keywords of “Dona” (the brand name of Viartril-S in the United States), “Viartril-S,” and “glucosamine” for supplementary content.

II.