Decolonizing Medicine

Gabriela Elisa Morales is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College.

Figures Preface: Positioning Critique INTRODUCTION: Waiting for Reform 1. The Bureaucratic Politics of Good Living: Health Policy in the Morales Era 2. Reorienting Care: Benevolence, Violence, and Medical Training 3. Warm and Cold: Cultural Adaptation and the Circulation of Temperature 4. Embodied Redistribution: Extraction and the Labor of Healing 5. Doctor, Patient, Kin: Remaking Hospital Relations 6. Accountable Care: Participatory Planning and the Practice of Complaint CONCLUSION: Political Aftermaths Acknowledgments Notes References Index

"This meticulous book illuminates why and how the 'leftist' or 'progressive' government of Evo Morales ended up reinscribing rather than dismantling deeply rooted histories of global capitalism and colonialism in health care. This is a remarkable accomplishment with many lessons for anthropology, social medicine, history, and Latin American studies." -Cesar E. Abadia-Barrero, University of Connecticut "A model of anthropological critique as a form of solidarity and of action, Decolonizing Medicine takes a hard look at the mechanisms of decolonization in our everyday lives. Focusing on state health care provision to indigenous people in the highlands of Bolivia, Morales describes an all too familiar situation: the way promises and policies of decolonisation are thwarted by entrenched structural inequalities and are coopted by liberal forms of recognition and commensuration. In Decolonizing Medicine, Gabriela Morales has complicated the morality play of our contemporary moment-one that suggests decolonization is simply a matter of finding the political will. This book pushes us to ask ourselves what it takes to decolonize: what are we willing to give up, what are we willing to transform, how far are we willing or able to go, to begin to decolonize our everyday lives? This important book will change the way you think about decolonization, care, and the possibility of real political, social and infrastructural change within liberal societies." -Lisa Stevenson, McGill University "Decolonizing Medicine offers a lively and trenchant account of efforts to 'decolonize' state institutions and biomedical practices. It exemplifies the ethnographic capacity to move between scales and to powerfully illuminate the lived effects of broader political shifts and policy reforms as they reach into the most intimate moments of people's lives. Centering the knowledge practices, analytical insights, modes of critique, and ethical claims of Indigenous patients, their family members, midwives, and traditional healers, this book opens new possibilities for political action and practices of accountability amid enduring inequality." -Susan Ellison, Wellesley College