Going Global in Century XXI: Medical Anthropology and the New Primary Health Care

Abstract

I argue here that there is a need for medical anthropology to innovate conceptual and methodological tools to work effectively within complex social spaces created by the articulation of the global and the local in the liberal nonstate. The need for such innovation is suggested by a criticism of the local consequences of global neoliberal health reform and consideration of the potential practical health policies that emerge from such a criticism, especially the need for greater “community participation” in health. In this criticism I draw on the example of market-based health reform in postsocialist Mongolia. This example suggests that the applied medical anthropology of the future must be one that integrates across multiple levels of analysis, straddling the local and the global. It should cast a critical eye on local civil society, the local manifestations of global policy, and take an activist orientation to global health advocacy. Anthropologists must become master synthesizers, sensitive to local mea...

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