Global Health

Given the discipline's international focus, medical anthropologists have contributed to “global health” since well before it was consolidated as a field. This chapter argues that the intersection of medical anthropology with global health has fostered distinctive, productive domains of critical conceptual development. It organizes these in four overlapping domains: global health and the legacies of social medicine; anthropological perspectives on global health ethics; global studies of science and technology; and anthropological perspectives on global health governance. A medical anthropology of and in global health takes up the challenge of linking or grounding processes of globalization to health and health‐related practices (health movements, treatments, knowledges, programs, policy processes, humanitarian action, etc.) in local contexts. Social medicine's critical theoretical perspective focuses on health inequities in reference to assemblages of international and regional political economy, history, and development ideologies.