Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: This essay summarizes and responds to the Think Pieces gathered here through the lens of critical global health.I ask: What does global health offer that differs from the international health efforts of the past half-century?What kinds of critical scrutiny do these efforts warrant?How do these disparate efforts represented here coalesce and converge under the gaze of critique, and still offer insights about how to do global health work today?Keywords critical global health, metrics, contemporary ethnography The provocation of this collection of think pieces, and the 'Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography' book series from which it draws, is the question: what is 'critical global health'?To answer, I think one must begin with the prior question: what is 'global health'?Before we turn to the possibility of critical engagement, that is, we might revisit the widely shared sentiment among many medical anthropologists who had devoted years to the work of 'international health' that 'global health' was itself a bit of a thief.In the halls of anthropology departments and at our professional meetings, there was a palpable feeling of being hijacked.The long-term commitment to whatever it was many of us in anthropology had been doing for many decades (health development, international health, human rights health) was being pulled out from under us, like a rug from under some heavy furniture, as this new thing called 'global health' was rolled out and paraded forward, kind of like an IKEA remodel.Leaner, more cost-effective, and geographically unbounded, this global health was being offered as a corrective to what had come before.Just as with
Source: Medicine Anthropology Theory
DOI: 10.17157/mat.3.2.429
Author: Vincanne Adams
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2737626380