Description: Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism provides ethnographic accounts of the effects of healthcare privatization for indigenous Maya people in Guatemala. This volume will greatly interest scholars in anthropology, global health, and public policy by offering insight into ...
Review Quotes:
"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