Christopher Morris

Associate Professor

Anthropology: Medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, extractive industries, indigeneity, ethnicity, colonial and postcolonial histories, governance, im/material properties, southern Africa

My research explores medical and environmental politics as intertwined sites of governance and contestation. Through ethnographic work in southern Africa and beyond, I examine how these politics are lived and enacted across everyday and institutional settings.

My book Biotraffic: Medicines and Environmental Governance in the Afterlives of Apartheid (University of California Press, 2024) is grounded in long-term ethnographic and archival research in South Africa and England. It centers on the former apartheid “homeland” of Ciskei, a region that has become a hub for biological resource access. The book follows one of these resources, the medicinal plant Pelargonium sidoides, from its early twentieth-century career as a contested “secret remedy” for tuberculosis to its reinvention as an internationally marketed medicine for the common cold. By following the plant’s movement into global medicinal markets, I show how biodiversity governance—especially “access-and-benefit-sharing” frameworks—can reorganize political authority on the ground and intensify contests over land and belonging in a region still shaped by apartheid’s legacies. Across this story, I develop biotraffic as an analytic for the patterned movement of biological value through different and overlapping lanes—commodity extraction, scientific testing, and proprietary claims—and for the governance work required to make those movements appear as a single, ethical chain of authorization and benefit.

In another study, I used interviews with medical doctors and researchers to examine a unique clinical trial in South Africa that assessed the safety and efficacy of an African medicine in HIV-seropositive persons. More recently, I wrote about scientists tracking plastic-associated chemicals amid South Africa’s electricity crisis, showing how ecological research is both constrained and enabled by uneven infrastructures.

My research has been published in venues like American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology, and Journal of Southern African Studies, among others. I have received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.

Selected Publications

2024. Biotraffic: Medicines and Environmental Governance in the Afterlives of Apartheid. University of California Press.

2024. "Rhythms of Pollution and Power: Investigating the Environmental Impact of Chemicals During South Africa’s Energy Crisis." Anthropology Now 16 (2): 1-12.

2023. Invited Review of Contested Properties: Peoples, Plants, and Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa, by Britta Rutert. Anthropos 118 (2): 658-660.

2019. "A 'Homeland's' Harvest: Biotraffic and Biotrade in the Contemporary Ciskei Region of South Africa." Journal of Southern African Studies 45 (3): 597-616.

2017. "Biopolitics and Boundary Work in South Africa's Sutherlandia Clinical Trial." Medical Anthropology 36 (7): 685-698.

2016. "Royal Pharmaceuticals: Bioprospecting, Rights, and Traditional Authority in South Africa." American Ethnologist 43 (3): 525-539.

2012. “Pharmaceutical Bioprospecting and the Law: The Case of Umckaloabo in a Former Apartheid Homeland of South Africa.” Anthropology News 53(10): 6-7.

2010. “The Anthropology of Globalization,” in H. James Birx (ed) 21^st Century Anthropology. Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA.

Courses Taught

ANTH 114 - Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

ANTH 320 - Global Africa

ANTH 330 - Peoples and Cultures of Africa

ANTH 370 - Environment and Culture

ANTH 376 - Food and Culture

ANTH 381 - Medical Anthropology

ANTH 490 - History of Anthropological Theory

ANTH 535 - Sociocultural Theory in Anthropology

ANTH 650 - Ethnographic Research Methods

Education

PhD, Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder