Whose Global, Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration with Careful Equivocation

Which Ethnography? Whose Ethnography? Medical anthropology's Epistemic Sensibilities Among Health Ethnographies

Medical anthropologists working in interdisciplinary teams often articulate expertise with respect to ethnography. Yet increasingly, health scientists utilize ethnographic methods. Through a comparative review of health ethnographies, and autoethnographic observations from interdisciplinary research, we find that anthropological ethnographies and health science ethnographies are founded on different epistemic sensibilities. Differences center on temporalities of research, writing processes, sites of social intervention, uses of theory, and analytic processes. Understanding what distinguishes anthropological ethnography from health science ethnography enables medical anthropologists - who sometimes straddle these two ethnographic modes - to better articulate their epistemic positionality and facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations.

The 'diagnostic gap' and 'economic burden' of depression: Global mental health in neoliberal Poland (2010s-2020s)

While critical sociologists and anthropologists of health have questioned Global Mental Health policies as postcolonial, developmental agendas, little is known on how this critique applies within the central and eastern European countries. As this article shows with the case of Poland, since the advent of capitalism and liberal democracy, the psychiatric conceptualization of depression has steadily aligned with global mental health (GMH) frameworks, amplifying pre-existing trends towards biomedical dominance in Polish psychiatry and the economic framing of mental health in policy-making. These trends are evidenced by the study of Polish Psychiatry, an official journal issued by Polish Psychiatric Association and health policy documents published since the 2010s, including statements by the Ministry of Health. Two findings are presented: first, the logic of 'closing the gap' between Poland and the West has shaped how depression prevalence data is produced and interpreted by state medical institutions and in expert psychiatric discourse; second, the reconceptualization of mental illness through its supposed economic cost has become a dominant approach to depression in Polish psychiatry and public health. Thus, in showing how the Global Mental Health agenda has permeated the specific context of Poland, promoting more individual and biomedical conceptions of mental illness, this case study enables advancing the postcolonial critique of mental health.

Not All Citations Are Equal: Reflections from Medical Anthropology in the Philippines

Long before recent calls to decolonize anthropology, practitioners of "national anthropologies"-such as local anthropologists from/in/of the Philippines-have sought to implement a more inclusive kind of scholarship, and this has been reflected in their citational practices. Indeed, a look at the scholarly output of Philippine anthropologists would show a diverse set of citations that feature local scholarship, including those written in Filipino. As I will show in this article, however, not all citations are equal. Theoretical and methodological citations are typically drawn from Euro-American scholars while scholarship from the Global South is typically invoked as illustrative examples, as parallels, and to set context. Such citational practices, I argue, are a consequence of particular disciplinary histories and divergent priorities. They reinforce the inequalities of power and academic capital within medical anthropology, raising the need for more reflexivity not just about whom medical anthropologists cite but for what reasons.

Decolonising the global to local movement: Time for a new paradigm

Mama Amaan Project (MAP) delivered perinatal education and doula services to underserved refugee and immigrant communities in Seattle, Washington. MAP presented at a 'global to local (glocal)' workshop for US-based global health agencies redirecting their experience and resources to address domestic health crises. Glocal models reference Global South anti-colonial social transformations through Primary Health Care (PHC) - 'health for all as a right' and investment in strong public sectors. As Black women working in our communities, we resisted labelling MAP glocal. Western donors and NGOs appropriate PHC's community participation narratives, meanwhile implementing World Bank/IMF economic structural adjustment health system cuts - thereby shifting austerity-related resource shortfalls to communities. In US contexts of neoliberal shrinking social safety nets and workers' rights, similar strategies to address austerity-related health disparities are promoted as 'global to local'. Projects like MAP cannot substitute quality public services. They expose gaps and build community empowerment to demand quality healthcare. Drawing on MAP and 'global health' experience in Mozambique, we call for re-embracing PHC's activist values - agitating for health as a universal human right for all, rather than putting the burden and blame on underserved communities. We propose decolonising the 'glocal' paradigm by embracing 'transnationality', 'relationality' and 'mutuality'.

'If I don't take care of myself, who will?' Self-caring subjects in Oaxaca's mutual-aid groups

Based on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in two urban health centres in Oaxaca City, Mexico, this paper analyses the ways in which underprivileged middle-aged and older female patients experience and transform grupos de ayuda mutua (GAMs), or mutual-aid groups, a public health programme aimed at improving chronic patients' adherence to their biomedical treatments. GAMs work as 'technologies of the self' within the context of the Mexican neoliberal regime and patients are urged to be self-responsible. GAM members regard such urging favourably and act according to their broader understandings of life, which they see as a lucha (struggle) that requires cuidarse (a polysemic verb alluding to self-care for self-preservation) and hard work in a structurally unequal place characterised by precarity and social unrest. This seemingly rugged individualism is converted into microlevel collaboration through culturally distinctive Oaxacan practices of mutual help. By exploring the playful ways these women participate in GAMs, this paper shows how biomedical settings can be repurposed as spaces of socialisation and wellbeing for older women living in vulnerable conditions.

Environmental Politics of Reproduction

What constitutes "human reproduction" is under negotiation as its biology, social nature, and cultural valences are increasingly perceived as bound up in environmental issues. This review maps the growing overlap between formerly rather separate domains of reproductive politics and environmental politics, examining three interrelated areas. The first is the emergence of an intersectional environmental reproductive justice framework in activism and environmental health science. The second is the biomedical delineation of the environment of reproduction and development as an object of growing research and intervention, as well as the marking off of early-life environments as an "exposed biology" consequential to the entire life span. Third is researchers' critical engagement with the reproductive subject of environmental politics and the lived experience of reproduction in environmentally dystopic times. Efforts to rethink the intersections of reproductive and environmental politics are found throughout these three areas.