Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique

Description

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. Cover ......Page 1 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments ......Page 8 Introduction: ​Care and the Work of History ......Page 12 1. Governing Multiplicities......Page 40 2. Making Communities of Care......Page 68 3. Afterlives: Food, Time, and History......Page 99 4. Nourishing Relations......Page 123 5. The Work of Health in the Public Sector......Page 153 6. Paperwork: Capacities of Data and Care......Page 178 Afterword: ​Critique and Caring Futures......Page 203 Notes ......Page 210 Works Cited ......Page 228 D ......Page 248 I ......Page 249 P ......Page 250 V ......Page 251 Z ......Page 252