Lexington Books
Pages: 228
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-4985-0537-6 • Hardback • September 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)
978-1-4985-0538-3 • eBook • September 2015 • $115.00 • (£88.00)
Anita Chary is an MD/PhD candidate in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Peter Rohloff is an instructor in medicine at Harvard University, an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Preface
Acknowledgements
IntroductionPeter Rohloff & Anita Chary
Part One: The Public-Private Interface
Chapter 1Strategic Alliances: The Shifting Motivations for NGO Collaboration with Government Programs
Jonathan Maupin
Chapter 2“Mi Familia Pobreza”: Conditional Cash Transfers and Maternal-Child Health in Rural Guatemala
Shom Dasgupta-Tsinikas and Paul Wise
Chapter 3Forced Motherhood in Guatemala: An Analysis of the Thousand Days Initiative
Alejandra Colom
Part Two: Commoditizing Care
Chapter 4“This Disease Is for Those Who Can Afford It”: Diabetes in Indigenous Maya Communities
David Flood and Peter Rohloff
Chapter 5Capitalizing on Care: Marketplace Quasi-pharmaceuticals in the Guatemalan Health-seeking Landscape
Rachel Hall-Clifford
Part Three: Navigating Novel Resources
Chapter 6Engaging Mental Healthcare in a Disengaged System
Carla Pezzia
Chapter 7Hysterectomies and Healer Shopping: Cervical Cancer and Therapeutic Anarchy in Guatemala
Anita Chary
Chapter 8Leveraging Resources in Contemporary Maya Midwifery
Nora King, Anita Chary, and Peter Rohloff
Chapter 9Conclusion: A Bad Conscience of Justice!
Peter Benson
References
Contributors
Index
The long-term effects of neoliberal agendas to privatize global health are still being revealed, particularly in developing countries still recovering from devastating policies of structural adjustment. This collection offers stunning and often harrowing ethnographic details about these effects in Guatemala. Without romanticizing the nation's past or glossing over its persistent national challenges, the authors here reveal how the blending of public, private, humanitarian and for-profit medical resources today far too often fails patients, marginalizes indigenous healers, and secures profits for the wrong reasons. This should be a model for studies of medical pluralism for the 21st Century.
— Vincanne Adams, University of California, San Francisco
This volume offers a nuanced, yet amazingly lucid and hard-hitting critique of the NGOization of health care, even in contexts like Guatemala where the postcolonial state offered little before implantation of neoliberal policies. This “Republic of NGOs” offers a pluralism that nonetheless displaces traditional, indigenous health systems. A must read for scholars and students of medical anthropology, NGOs, and contemporary Central America.
— Mark Schuller, Northern Illinois University