Post-social prescriptions : medical welfare in Mozambique
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Based on twenty-four months of fieldwork, this dissertation explores how welfare -- the provision of social goods and supports -- is being configured through transnational medical intervention and public health policy in Mozambique. My research was concerned with how a variety of techniques, diagnoses, and criteria were used to mediate families' access to care and social supports as well as with the kinds of social and material opportunities these interventions made available. In a context marked by material scarcity far beyond the well-defined clinical criteria through which medical welfare supports were channeled, I was interested in how a variety of differently situated actors -- including health planners, donors, psychologists, counselors, and nurses, members of patients associations, volunteers, family members and patients -- defined, diagnosed, and accessed welfare needs. I also aimed to trace how legal and ethical norms structured and emerged out of these new welfare assemblages, and asked why and how contested, gendered family relationships came to be a privileged locus for these medical-social interventions. I investigated how planners, workers, patients and families negotiated institutional and everyday practices of care in order to understand how new modes of diagnosis, treatment, care, and social support for children and patients are taken up across a range of institutional and non-institutional sites. Based on this research, I argue that medical welfare interventions instantiate a new mode of governance in Mozambique, one in which the state not only provides services but also (even primarily) coordinates non-governmental endeavors and constitutes individuals and communities as available for humanitarian intervention. As a result, new forms of claims-making and claims-denying, including and beyond citizenship claims, are emerging in medical welfare spaces, as diagnoses of individual and community "vulnerability" become means of mobilizing new forms of care and material resources. Crucially, I suggest, these dynamics are shaped not only by contemporary development practice but also by historical legacies of colonialism, conflict and intervention that have shaped the politics of biomedical knowledge and transnational aid in contemporary Mozambique.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | McKay, Ramah Katherine |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
| Primary advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Thesis advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Advisor | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Ramah McKay. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2010. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2010 by Ramah Katherine McKay
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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