Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series) - Softcover

"This superb new edited volume is extraordinarily timely and important." -Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute "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. ... [It] is also book-ended with trenchant, provocative commentaries on the operative theories and current practices of public health in Africa....Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa is an ideal fit for teaching the history or anthropology of public health at the undergraduate or graduate level." - Social History of Medicine "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 "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 "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 Public health in Africa-as elsewhere-is 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

"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; and Noemi Tousignant.