Main 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.

Contents:

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Care and the Work of History 1
1. Governing Multiplicities 29
2. Making Communities of Care 57
3. Afterlives: Food, Time, and History 88
4. Nourishing Relations 112
5. The Work of Health in the Public Sector 142
6. Paperwork: Capacities of Data and Care 167
Afterword. Critique and Caring Futures 192
Notes 199
Works Cited 217
Index 237