ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, intertwined with epidemiological and technological changes. The resulting fragmented medical science landscape is shaped and sustained by transnational flows of expertise and resources. NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other nonstate actors now play a significant role in medical research and treatment. But as the contributors to this volume argue, these groups have not supplanted the primacy of the nation-state in Africa. Although not necessarily stable or responsive, national governments remain crucial in medical care, both as employers of health care professionals and as sources of regulation, access, and – albeit sometimes counterintuitively - trust for their people. “The state” has morphed into the “para-state” — not a monolithic and predictable source of sovereignty and governance, but a shifting, and at times ephemeral, figure. Tracing the emergence of the “global health” paradigm in Africa in the treatment of HIV, malaria, and leprosy, this book challenges familiar notions of African statehood as weak or illegitimate by elaborating complex new frameworks of governmentality that can be simultaneously functioning and dysfunctional.

Contributors. Uli Beisel, Didier Fassin, P. Wenzel Geissler, Rene Gerrets, Ann Kelly, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, Lotte Meinert, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Branwyn Poleykett, Susan Reynolds Whyte

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

P. Wenzel Geissler is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. He is the coauthor (with R. J. Prince) of The Land Is Dying and coeditor of a number of books, including Evidence, Ethos and Experiment.

REVIEWS

“Para-States and Medical Science is an exceptional and engaging book that will be of interest to anthropologists, Africanists and historians as well as those interested in science and technology, post-colonial and development studies.”

-- Mary-Anne Decatur Anthropology Book Forum

"Individual chapters focus specifically on processes of medical research, not health care delivery, but in so doing provide an often overlooked perspective on the types of medical work undertaken in Africa.... Summing up: Recommended."

-- M. M. Heaton Choice

"I highly recommend this volume for anyone interested in the social relations of biomedicine, and particularly biomedical research, in Africa. As an interdisciplinary anthropologist who works on this topic, I found the book’s provocation to pay attention to the persistence of the African state extremely useful—suddenly, I am seeing the state in places in my work that I had formerly overlooked. I also appreciated this volume’s empirical documentation of the numerous ways in which, despite persistent inequalities, African actors—states, institutions, and individuals—shape global health partnerships and the knowledge they produce."

-- Johanna Crane Medical Anthropology Quarterly

"Para-States and Medical Science is an impressive volume and a welcome addition to work on critical global health in Africa. The collection provides a much needed re-reading of contemporary biopolitical regimes in Africa, which neither fit old models of biopower nor conform to neoliberal forms found elsewhere. ... this work makes an original and innovative contribution to scholarship on the shifting relations between state, public, private and corporate interests in health care in Africa, and makes inroads for anthropologists, historians and STS scholars to move beyond standard narratives of 'development' and 'neoliberalism' in African contexts."

-- Michelle Pentecost New Genetics and Society

"The volume should become mandatory reading for scholars and students interested in the new configurations and possibilities that emerge on the African continent in the context of medical globalization, and which demonstrate (once more) that rigid distinctions between the global, national and local, public and private, state and non-state have become untenable, if not useless."

-- Hansjörg Dilger Africa

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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