Main description:

"This volume contributes significantly to the rapidly developing scholarship of public health and global health in African contexts, considered either as a collection of excellent chapters or taken as the sum of its parts..." -Social History of Medicine This volume explores how medical professionals and patients, government officials, and ordinary citizens approach questions of public health as they navigate contemporary landscapes of NGOs and transnational projects, faltering state services, and expanding privatization. Its contributors analyze the relations between the public and the private providers of public health, from the state to new global biopolitical formations of political institutions, markets, human populations, and health. Tensions and ambiguities animate these complex relationships, suggesting that the question of what public health actually is in Africa cannot be taken for granted. Offering historical and ethnographic analyses, the volume develops an anthropology of public health in Africa.Contributors: P. Wenzel Geissler; Murray Last; Rebecca Marsland; Lotte Meinert; Benson A. Mulemi; Ruth J. Prince; and Noemi Tousignant.

Contents:

* Acknowledgments * Introduction Situating Health and the Public in Africa Historical and Anthropological Perspectives RUTH J. PRINCE * Part I WHOSE PUBLIC HEALTH? * One The Peculiarly Political Problem behind Nigeria's Primary Health Care Provision MURRAY LAST * Two Who Are the "Public" in Public Health? Debating Crowds, Populations, and Publics in Tanzania REBECCA MARSLAND * Three The Qualities of Citizenship Private Pharmacists and the State in Senegal after Independence and Alternance NOEMI TOUSIGNANT * Part II REGIMES AND RELATIONS OF CARE * Four Regimes of Homework in AIDS Care Questions of Responsibility and the Imagination of Lives in Uganda LOTTE MEINERT * Five "Home-Based Care Is Not a New Thing" Legacies of Domestic Governmentality in Western Kenya HANNAH BROWN * Six Technologies of Hope Managing Cancer in a Kenyan Hospital BENSON A. MULEMI * Part III EMERGING LANDSCAPES OF PUBLIC HEALTH * Seven The Publics of the New Public Health Life Conditions and "Lifestyle Diseases" in Uganda SUSAN REYNOLDS WHYTE * Eight Navigating "Global Health" in an East African City RUTH J. PRINCE * Nine The Archipelago of Public Health Comments on the Landscape of Medical Research in Twenty-First-Century Africa P. WENZEL GEISSLER * Bibliography * Contributors * Index