Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography

Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi's urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as they negotiate an over-extended health system unequipped to respond to the disease.

In Cooking Data Cal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi in which she rethinks how quantitative health data is produced by showing how data production is inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce it.

Ramah McKay follows two medical projects in Mozambique through the day-to-day lives of patients and health care providers, showing how transnational medical resources and infrastructures give rise to diverse possibilities for work and care amid constraint.

This gripping book narrates the efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-eight people in a Venezuelan rainforest between 2007 and 2008 and sketches out systematic health inequities regarding the rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health throughout indigenous communities.

In Metabolic Living Harris Solomon studies obesity and diabetes in Mumbai, India, presenting a new narrative of metabolic illness in which it is less about the overconsumption of food than it is about the body's relationship to its environment and the substances it absorbs.

The contributors to Metrics use ethnographic evidence from around the globe to evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and the consequences of applying metrics to global health. Now the standard in measuring global health program success, metrics has far implications that extend beyond patients to the political and financial realms.

Zoë H. Wool explores how the most severely injured veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars rehabilitating at Walter Reed Medical Center—whether recovering from losing a limb or sustaining a traumatic brain injury—struggle to build some kind of ordinary life in a situation that is anything but ordinary.

In this ethnography of addicted, pregnant, and poor women living in daily-rent hotels in San Francisco, Kelly Ray Knight examines the myriad struggles these women face, as well as their encounters with social and medical institutions. She asks: what kinds of futures are possible for these women?

Sharon R. Kaufman examines the quandary of patients, families and doctors not knowing the point where enough medical treatment becomes too much treatment. A hidden chain of drivers among science, industry, new technology, and insurance spur this quandary, serving to obscure the ability to identify the difference between extraordinary and ordinary medicine.

In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, intertwined with epidemiological and technological changes. The resulting fragmented medical science landscape is shaped and sustained by transnational flows of expertise and resources. NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other nonstate actors now play a significant role in medical research and treatment. But as the contributors to this volume argue, these groups have not supplanted the primacy of the nation-state in Africa. Although not necessarily stable or responsive, national governments remain crucial in medical care, both as employers of health care professionals and as sources of regulation, access, and – albeit sometimes counterintuitively - trust for their people. “The state” has morphed into the “para-state” — not a monolithic and predictable source of sovereignty and governance, but a shifting, and at times ephemeral, figure. Tracing the emergence of the “global health” paradigm in Africa in the treatment of HIV, malaria, and leprosy, this book challenges familiar notions of African statehood as weak or illegitimate by elaborating complex new frameworks of governmentality that can be simultaneously functioning and dysfunctional.

Contributors. Uli Beisel, Didier Fassin, P. Wenzel Geissler, Rene Gerrets, Ann Kelly, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, Lotte Meinert, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Branwyn Poleykett, Susan Reynolds Whyte

In this ethnography of impotence as a medical and social phenomenon, Everett Yuehong Zhang argues that the recent increase in Chinese men seeking treatment for impotence represents a shift in changing sexual attitudes in capitalist China.

During the first decade of this millennium, many thousands of people in Uganda who otherwise would have died from AIDS got second chances at life. The essays in Second Chances draw on personal accounts and a broad knowledge of Ugandan culture and history to explore antiretroviral therapy from the perspective of those people.