Global health interventions
On Friday the 6th of September 2024, members of the Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network convened in the African Studies Center to discuss Global Health Interventions.
We started our meeting with a fruitful discussion of the Annual Review of Anthropology article Global Health Interventions: The Military, the Magic Bullet, the Deterministic Model – and Intervention Otherwise by Emily Yates-Doerr, Lauren Carruth, Gideon Lasco and Rosario García-Meza. We connected the lines of critique that the authors distinguished in the literature to experiences in our own research fields. Herein we noted – like the article’s authors – how global health interventions that we encounter in our work, are often presented as a ‘magic bullet’. In one case, for example, an intervention that worked well in one part of the country that had a specific demographic, social and historical background, was scaled up to the entire country with disappointing results. The various social contexts had unfortunately not been taken into consideration. We also discussed that it is not only global health programs, but also local health systems and other initiatives (beyond biomedicine) that can be perceived as ‘magic bullets’, highlighting the persuasive appeal of health interventions presented this way. Another point of discussion was that we should also be aware of how categorizations operate within health care programs and that these can create specific norms, which may lead to in-and exclusion mechanisms. Again relating to the article, we further talked about how ‘security’ remains an important driver of global health interventions.
Beyond critique, the authors also propose to think about intervention otherwise, stating that ‘we can also amplify how people are using global health to build and remake new kinds of social relations of health and care’ (2023, 189). This became an important theme in our discussion. As medical anthropologists, how can we better leverage our potential to foster collaborations? How do we amplify contextual and interdisciplinary work that does generate positive effects in global health programs? And importantly, how do we balance our critical perspective with the wish to contribute to improving interventions, particularly starting from a position of collaboration? To achieve this, we may need to find clearer ways to add to global health interventions (alternatives for ‘otherwise’?). An important conclusion for us was that collaborations require that we keep aiming for change and improvement in (global) health – taking small steps without losing sight on the need for structural change.
Photo exhibition and book launch of TRACES
We welcome you to the photo exhibition and book launch of TRACES at the African Studies Centre Leiden on the occasion of the opening of the new, Herta Mohr building of Leiden University, 8 October 2024, from 5PM.
TRACES presents a photo-ethnographic project that investigates how violent conflict reverberates across borders and generations. It explores the ways in which people connect to conflict in the past and present despite (temporal and geographical) ‘distance’.
When ten years after the civil war, a new political crisis announced itself in Burundi in 2015, anthropologist Lidewyde Berckmoes felt forced to leave her ‘second home’. The peaceful future she had hoped to contribute to, seemed shattered. For a long time, it remained unsafe to return to broken Burundi, and so she wanted to learn from other people who live with its traces.
Through photo-ethnography in the Netherlands and Belgium, Marieke Maagdenberg (photography) and Lidewyde Berckmoes (ethnography) explored how young people of Burundian heritage relate to the conflict past and present in Burundi. In the work, they open up questions of transnational belonging, diaspora activism and legacies and reiterations of conflict trauma. In the exhibition, visitors can see part of the art photography of the project by Maagdenberg, as well as hear more about the findings detailed in their photo-ethnography TRACES.