The worlds of public health, anthropological excursions By DidierFassin, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2023. 274 pp.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: How is knowledge organized, produced, and constructed in relation to health?What kinds of "truth" does the field of public health produce?How is this different from the kinds of truth that clinical medicine produces, the truth to which governments respond and the (post-) truth that societies debate?How are these organizations and productions of truth at the same time moral and political?Whose injury or suffering is deemed worthy of becoming a crisis?And what are the implications of a moral economy in which the injured or suffering body becomes the most acceptable way of talking about inequality?These are some of the important questions that anthropologist and physician Didier Fassin asks in his series of lectures at the Collège de France in 2020 and 2021, compiled in this new book (translated from the French [Fassin, 2021]).The book presents an appealing, creative and critical exploration of public health as an object of study, a series of "anthropological excursions" as Fassin describes it.Rather than attempting to construct a unified theory of public health, he focuses on "the stakes -theoretical and epistemological, political and moral -that can be illuminated by problems deemed to be concerns of public health" (10).Fassin explores childhood lead poisoning in France in the late 1980s as a central case study throughout the book, paired alongside other cases of major public health crises (for example, the final chapter is focused on the COVID-19 pandemic).Fassin illustrates the realities produced and the changes of gaze implied when lead poisoning becomes framed as a public health issue.From a rare and serious condition seen in hospitals by pediatricians and reported as individual patient cases (the gaze of medicine), childhood lead poisoning is transformed into a public health crisis-risk quantified by epidemiologists in terms of IQ points lost or deviant acts potentiated (the gaze of public health).This crisis, due to exposure to paint in old and insalubrious housing, was then understood to require urgent action, including policymaking as well as housing renovation and rehousing.However, this transformation was slow, and principal actors in the process (community activists and public health advocates) faced several challenges, from the complicity of governmental actors and paint industries, to culturalist explanations that prevailed among health experts.These culturalist understandings allowed authorities and societies to avoid their responsibility for the lead contamination of children of Med.
Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/maq.12892
Authors: Mayssa Rekhis, Seth M. Holmes
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403379333