Synopses & Reviews
Africa has emerged as a prime arena of global health interventions that focus on particular diseases and health emergencies. These are framed increasingly in terms of international concerns about security, human rights, and humanitarian crisis. This presents a stark contrast to the 1960s and ‘70s, when many newly independent African governments pursued the vision of public health “for all,” of comprehensive health care services directed by the state with support from foreign donors. These initiatives often failed, undermined by international politics, structural adjustment, and neoliberal policies, and by African states themselves. Yet their traces remain in contemporary expectations of and yearnings for a more robust public health.
This volume explores how medical professionals and patients, government officials, and ordinary citizens approach questions of public health as they navigate contemporary landscapes of NGOs and transnational projects, faltering state services, and expanding privatization. Its contributors analyze the relations between the public and the private providers of public health, from the state to new global biopolitical formations of political institutions, markets, human populations, and health. Tensions and ambiguities animate these complex relationships, suggesting that the question of what public health actually is in Africa cannot be taken for granted. Offering historical and ethnographic analyses, the volume develops an anthropology of public health in Africa.
Contributors: P. Wenzel Geissler; Murray Last; Rebecca Marsland; Lotte Meinert; Benson A. Mulemi; Ruth J. Prince; and Noemi Tousignant.
Review
Public health in Africaas elsewhereis no longer strictly public. Public and private providers are involved in national and transnational partnerships that divide responsibility for health and welfare among a number of agencies and actors. These clear and powerful essays set out this new landscape, exploring how medical professionals and patients, government officials and citizens approach questions of health. This text is required reading for anyone interested in contemporary Africa.”
Henrietta L. Moore, author of Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions
Review
Anchored in a clear and nuanced political and social history, an expansive anthropological understanding of healing, and an ethnographically rich comprehension of policy as it plays out on the ground, this excellent new collection gets at the heart of the plural and contradictory meanings of the publics that underlie African public health. Together the ethnographies of public health collected here demonstrate that we cannot assume the nature of public health by reading it through the logics of contemporary global health. Instead, the anthropologists in this book call for a careful rethinking of African public health as a domain of experimentation, political imagination, and social contestation, tracing its effects on the ground, and its future possibilities on the continent.”
Julie Livingston, author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
Review
A powerful and complex picture of what public health is in Africa today as commitments to national health systems are being reshaped through the dramatic rise of global health. This set of ethnographically rich and historically sensitive essays illustrates the forms of inequality that structure efforts to building health care institutions and that configure debates over who is responsible for the health and care of particular individuals. It is a must read for both Africanists interested in medicine and public health professionals who care about Africa.”
Stacey A. Langwick, author of Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania
Review
“Any medical anthropologist who works in Africa will want this book in a nearby library. Those of us who study African biomedicine and biomedical research, whether anthropologists or historians, will find it particularly valuable. . . . As a whole, this excellent collection enlarges the scope of public health and challenges readers to think deeply about who is responsible for African health—and for the many threats to it.”
—Claire Wendland, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Synopsis
This volume contributes significantly to the rapidly developing scholarship of public health and global health in African contexts, considered either as a collection of excellent chapters or taken as the sum of its parts Social History of Medicine This volume explores how medical professionals and patients, government officials, and ordinary citizens approach questions of public health as they navigate contemporary landscapes of NGOs and transnational projects, faltering state services, and expanding privatization. Its contributors analyze the relations between the public and the private providers of public health, from the state to new global biopolitical formations of political institutions, markets, human populations, and health. Tensions and ambiguities animate these complex relationships, suggesting that the question of what public health actually is in Africa cannot be taken for granted. Offering historical and ethnographic analyses, the volume develops an anthropology of public health in Africa.
Contributors: P. Wenzel Geissler;Murray Last;Rebecca Marsland;Lotte Meinert;Benson A. Mulemi; Ruth J. Prince; andNoemi Tousignant.
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About the Author
Ruth Prince is a research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Oslo.
Rebecca Marsland is a lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Situating Health and the Public in Africa
Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
RUTH J. PRINCE
Part I
WHOSE PUBLIC HEALTH?
One
The Peculiarly Political Problem behind Nigerias Primary Health Care Provision
MURRAY LAST
Two
Who Are the Public” in Public Health?
Debating Crowds, Populations, and Publics in Tanzania
REBECCA MARSLAND
Three
The Qualities of Citizenship
Private Pharmacists and the State in Senegal after Independence and Alternance
NOÉMI TOUSIGNANT
Part II
REGIMES AND RELATIONS OF CARE
Four
Regimes of Homework in AIDS Care
Questions of Responsibility and the Imagination of Lives in Uganda
LOTTE MEINERT
Five
Home-Based Care Is Not a New Thing”
Legacies of Domestic Governmentality in Western Kenya
HANNAH BROWN
Six
Technologies of Hope
Managing Cancer in a Kenyan Hospital
BENSON A. MULEMI
Part III
EMERGING LANDSCAPES OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Seven
The Publics of the New Public Health
Life Conditions and Lifestyle Diseases” in Uganda
SUSAN REYNOLDS WHYTE
Eight
Navigating Global Health” in an East African City
RUTH J. PRINCE
Nine
The Archipelago of Public Health
Comments on the Landscape of Medical Research in Twenty-First-Century Africa
P. WENZEL GEISSLER
Bibliography
Contributors
Index