Overview

In Mozambique, where more than half of the national health care budget comes from foreign donors, NGOs and global health research projects have facilitated a dramatic expansion of medical services. At once temporary and unfolding over decades, these projects also enact deeply divergent understandings of what care means and who does it. In Medicine in the Meantime, Ramah McKay follows two medical projects in Mozambique through the day-to-day lives of patients and health care providers, showing how transnational medical resources and infrastructures give rise to diverse possibilities for work and care amid constraint. Paying careful attention to the specific postcolonial and postsocialist context of Mozambique, McKay considers how the presence of NGOs and the governing logics of the global health economy have transformed the relations-between and within bodies, medical technologies, friends, kin, and organizations-that care requires and how such transformations pose new challenges for ethnographic analysis and critique.

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9780822370109

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Reviews

With meticulous sympathy and an eye for detail, Ramah McKay examines new entanglements of humanitarian sentiment and public institutions in Mozambique. Medicine in the Meantime reveals how care refracts through a prism of varied perspectives, ranging from nostalgic former refugees to harried professional counselors. Anyone who wants to understand what global health looks like in experience-beyond abstract metrics of lives and numbers-should read this book. -- Peter Redfield, author of * Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders * Medicine in the Meantime is a major contribution to critical studies of global health. With its careful tracing of the work of care and the politics of multiplicity, it stands as a milestone in scholarship on health care in contemporary Africa. Ramah McKay elegantly combines powerful, close-up descriptions of the dilemmas and concerns of care workers on the ground with broader theoretical discussions of the entanglements of transnational and national health services. -- Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor of * Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda *

A nuanced account. Medicine in the Meantime will greatly enrich anthropological conversations on health, transnational governmentality, and the state. It will likely find a wide audience both within and beyond medical anthropology. -- China Scherz * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *

Medicine in the Meantime is a major contribution to critical studies of global health. With its careful tracing of the work of care and the politics of multiplicity, it stands as a milestone in scholarship on health care in contemporary Africa. Ramah McKay elegantly combines powerful, close-up descriptions of the dilemmas and concerns of care workers on the ground with broader theoretical discussions of the entanglements of transnational and national health services. -- Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor of Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda With meticulous sympathy and an eye for detail, Ramah McKay examines new entanglements of humanitarian sentiment and public institutions in Mozambique. Medicine in the Meantime reveals how care refracts through a prism of varied perspectives, ranging from nostalgic former refugees to harried professional counselors. Anyone who wants to understand what global health looks like in experience-beyond abstract metrics of lives and numbers-should read this book. -- Peter Redfield, author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders

Author Information

Ramah McKay is Assistant Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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