Abstract
In this article, I call for an object-centered ethnography to illuminate the ontological multiplicity that marks the worlds of health and healing that people inhabit. Focusing on a sports-drink bottle filled with a remedy from a faith healer in rural South Africa, I explore the ‘partial connections’ that link the world of global health and the world of traditional healing through objects and bodies. Drawing on medical anthropology focused on global health and medical pluralism as well as scholarship from the ontological turn, I argue that global health programs are limited by their failure to recognize the ontological multiplicity their target populations inhabit.
Highlights
In December of 2015, we stopped at a mountainside homestead in a rural area locally known as Pholela in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Care when we learned that our old friends and cherished informants, Mkhulu and Gogo Hlela (Grandpa and Grandma Hlela), were sick
Gogo Hlela emerged from her unkempt garden with her grandson
Summary
In the past two decades, as global health programs have increased around the world, so has the scholarship about them. Critical medical anthropologists have made important contributions to this literature (Adams 2010, 2016; Adams, Burke, and Whitmarsh 2014; Biehl and Petryna 2013; Farmer et al 2013; Fassin 2006; Lakoff 2010) Central to their critiques has been an acknowledgement of the power differences between the global North and global South – the doers and the recipients of global health (Farmer 2005, 2006) – and an attention to the role of science, research, and training in global health programs (Biruk 2012; Crane 2013; Wendland 2012). Telling a global health story from the margins, like from the body, homestead, and objects of Gogo Hlela, opens up new questions, critiques, and avenues for analysis (Neely and Nading 2017)
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