Anthropology of Global Health

Global health has been the contested realm of theoretical debates and praxis in medical anthropology. Rationalities behind global health projects reflected the predominant mode of envisioning health in specific historical moments.· In this course, we will first assess the ways in which memories, materiality and institutions of the colonial past persist in the field of global health in Africa.· Secondly, we will explore how early medical anthropologists participated in international health projects in order to facilitate implementation of the Western biomedicine in developing countries by investigating cultural barriers under the post-war regime of international development in the efforts of controlling malaria and HIV/AIDS in Latin America. · Thirdly, we will examine achievements and limitations of subsequent critical medical anthropologists¿ shift of the focus of analysis on global health from culture to structure, larger political economic conditions that produced vast health inequalities around the world, including World Bank policies under the Cold War and neoliberal reforms that increased the prevalence of TB and other diseases in post-socialist contexts · Finally, we will question previous anthropological discourses on global health and propose potential insights by understanding moral imaginations of contemporary global health participants such as WHO or Gates Foundation and humanitarian medicine such as MSF, and continuities and discontinuities of colonial and developmental past in current global health movement.