Introduction : transfigurations of health and the moral economy of medicine : subjectivities, materialities, values

This special issue explores the deep entanglements between medicine, law, politics, morality and economy in the contemporary world order and asks how these entwinements shape illness experi - ences and forms of treatment and care in the varying locations of Egypt, Tanzania, Brazil and India. By introducing the concept of 'transfiguration', we highlight the highly ambiguous, ever-evolving and increasingly transnational character of these processes in the vastly contested and power-ridden fields of medicine and wellbeing. We also argue that a moral economy approach can figure as a lens to disentangle and disaggregate these different fields' values and practices analytically and to account for the need to reflect systematically on people's struggles for a 'good life' in the context of profit-driven and often highly exclusionary economies and their impacts on health care systems. Against this background, the contri - butions to this special issue ask, through a shared theoretical concern, how medicine, illness experience and medical knowledge production coalesce under the condition of 'excessive' economies in relation to subjectivities , materialities and values . In conclusion, we ask which ethical and political demands arise for anthropologists as novel, strongly politicised and morally loaded fields of research open up; and how we can respond to the challenges of doing research in the capital-intensive fields of medicine and health and act accordingly in our investigations and writings.