Book contents

Global Health for All. Knowledge, Politics and Practices takes a critical look at global health by analyzing some of its key epistemic and interventional practices: location, metrics, triage, markets, technology, care, regulation... An atypical work collectively written by an international research group of anthropologists and historians, Global Health for All highlights what these practices of global health say about configurations of science and power in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The book specifically addresses the workings of international and philanthropic institutions, financialized methods of health assessment, the relationship between health and development discourse, and health priority setting. To do so, its analyses draw from archival material and multi-scale ethnography conducted in a roving approach, focusing on both the policy centers, intervention sites, and intermediary spaces of global health - both the World Bank and national health bureaucracies and systems, as well as the WHO and research institutions.  To examine what happens when globalized logics, circulations, and actors work to imagine and manage health, the book moves through both conventional (Geneva, Washington DC, India, and East Africa) and unconventional sites of global health (Mexico, Oman, Stockholm, Cyprus, Cuba and Cambodia).

Contributors

Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Andrew McDowell, Claire Beaudevin, Claudia Lang, Olivia Fiorilli, Lucile Ruault, Anne M. Lovell, Caroline Meier zu Biesen, Jessica Pourraz, Vegard Traavik Sture, Mandy Geise, Sameea Ahmed Hassim, Fanny Chabrol, Christoph Gradmann, Laurent Pordié, Simeng Wang

Table of contents

Prologue: A Story with Sixteen Tellers
Introduction: Health Universalism and the Health of Others
Chapter 1: Localization in the Global
Chapter 2: Metrics for Development
Chapter 3: Triage Beyond the Clinic
Chapter 4: Markets, Medicines, and Health Globalization
Chapter 5: Tech for All
Chapter 6: Persistent Hospitals
Chapter 7: Provincializing the WHO
Epilogue: The Health of Others, Covid-19 and Beyond
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index

The book on the publisher's website

Reviews

"This is a deeply thoughtful and brilliantly argued book that cuts across stale debates to offer a new framework for conceptualizing health in a globalized world. Its compelling analysis is both important and urgent—as COVID-19 becomes a pivotal moment for rethinking approaches to health, it is crucial that new knowledge and interventions be guided by conceptual and methodological imperatives such as those offered in Global Health for All."
—Manjari Mahajan, Associate Professor of International Affairs & Starr Professor and Co-Director of the India China Institute, The New School

"This fantastic book paints an ambitious and sophisticated historical and ethnographic tableau of the global health field and the globalization of health during the last forty years or so. Articulated around a series of innovative themes, from political/economic triage to persistent hospitals to provincializing the WHO, the book is a must-read for anyone curious about the transformation of international health and biomedicine at the turn of the twentieth century."
—David Reubi, co-editor of Global Health and Geographical Imaginaries

"Drawing on multi-scalar, multi-sited, and multi-disciplinary research, Global Health for All challenges classic understandings of periodization of structures of international health versus a burgeoning global health movement to rethink the very foundations of what has emerged as practices aspiring toward "health universalism" in the twenty-first century.  This remarkable book is based on collaborative and team-based studies of the changing practices of tuberculosis treatment, of depression and global mental health, of the global marketing of alternative or traditional pharmaceuticals outside the boundaries of global health, and of local sites of medical genetics and genetic technologies by anthropologists and ethnographers, sociologists, and historians working in sites as diverse as the WHO and World Bank archives and field sites in India, Tanzania, Ghana, Senegal, and Oman.  Drawn together and collaboratively authored, this text provides the most innovative, deeply scholarly, and wonderfully theorized examination of what constitutes "global health."  While the term emerged in the 1990's, this book convincingly rejects any notions of the singularity of a new "field," arguing for the diversity of "health globalization arenas," of the circulations of concepts, techniques, peoples and goods across time and space, requiring deep analyses of practices aimed at producing standardization based in universal metrics, of efforts to model and 'bring to scale,' and of the role of complex ideologies and practices linking global health to economization, marketization, and neoliberalism.  The range of fascinating case studies, the scope of ideas, and the provocation for rethinking and new research is simply stunning.  It is a book to be pondered, contested, and taught."
—Byron Good, co-editor of A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities