Global Health for All Knowledge, Politics, and Practices

JEAN-PAUL GAUD I LL I ÈRE, ANDREW MCDOWELL, CLAUD I A LANG, AND CLA I RE BEAUDEV IN

“This fantastic book paints an ambitious and sophisticated historical and ethnographic tableau of the global health eld 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 mustread 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

Global Health for All is a collection of ethnographic chapters that focus on global health practices around the world. The overview and exploration of global health as it is actually happening is truly global in scope, but holds fast to in-depth, situated ethnographic and historiographic analyses of the spaces in which global health works. The book traces four subjects—tuberculosis, global mental health, genetics, and traditional medicines—and the people who interact with and enliven them, drawing on data collected through archival research and ethnographic interviewing in policymaking arenas like the WHO and the World Bank, as well as national health bureaucracies and research institutions in New Delhi, Mexico City, Havana, Stockholm, and beyond. The authors argue that seven themes are central for global health: localization, markets, metrics, triage, technology, hospitals, and the WHO. These themes form the book’s chapters. Each chapter was collectively written by a small group of scholars in conversation with each other and the rest of the book’s authors over a ve year span. As such, they create a cohesive narrative that builds an ethnographic narrative rather than a conventional edited volume. Instead, the chapters in Global Health for All simultaneously examines global health as a coherent system and as a dynamic, unpredictable collection of modular parts.

JEAN-PAUL GAUDILLIÈRE is a distinguished historian of science and senior researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in France.

ANDREW MCDOWELL is an assistant professor of anthropology at Tulane University.

CLAUDIA LANG is the Heisenberg Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Leipzig. She is the author of Depression in Karala: Ayurveda and Mental Health care in 21st Century India and a co-editor with William Sax of The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia

CLAIRE BEAUDEVIN is a researcher at the National Center for Scienti c Research (CNRS) in France. She is the co-editor of Global Health and the New World Order: Historical and Anthropological Approaches of a Transition.