Critical convergences

Abstract

Thinking through two objects – a focus group and a photograph – this essay suggests that ethnographic critique is not separate from but constitutive of global health. Social science representations, from data and focus groups to ethnographic descriptions and clinical snapshots, not only analyze, unpack, or depict global health; they also constitute it as a field of intervention and to define certain spaces, particularly clinical ones, as exemplary global health sites. This co-constitutive role complicates ethnographic critiques that see their role as primarily destabilizing global health facts. Rather, by drawing on feminist approaches to ethnography and critique, I suggest that convergences between ethnographic and global health knowledge stem from historical alignments through which anthropology and global health alike emerged and have come to circulate. These convergences point to the need for a ‘non-innocent’ critique of global health that centers the disciplinary complicity between, and methodological adjacency of, social science and global health.