Open AccessWorlds in a bottle
Author(s) -
Abigail H. Neely
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
medicine anthropology theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2405-691X
DOI - 10.17157/mat.6.4.642
Subject(s) - scholarship , ethnography , medical anthropology , faith , pluralism (philosophy) , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , global health , sociology , epistemology , health care , anthropology , political science , medicine , philosophy , law , family medicine
In this article, I call for an object-centered ethnography to illuminate the ontological multiplicity that marks the worlds of health and healing that people inhabit. Focusing on a sports-drink bottle filled with a remedy from a faith healer in rural South Africa, I explore the ‘partial connections’ that link the world of global health and the world of traditional healing through objects and bodies. Drawing on medical anthropology focused on global health and medical pluralism as well as scholarship from the ontological turn, I argue that global health programs are limited by their failure to recognize the ontological multiplicity their target populations inhabit.