Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism
Shifting Healthcare Landscapes in Maya Guatemala
Contributions by Peter Benson, Anita Chary, Alejandra Colom, Shom N. Dasgupta-Tsikinas, David Flood, Rachel Hall-Clifford, Nora King, Jonathan Maupin, Carla Pezzia, Peter Rohloff, Paul Wise Edited by Anita Chary, Peter Rohloff
Not available to order
Publication date:
17 September 2015Length of book:
228 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498505383
Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism is the first collection of its kind to explore the contemporary terrain of healthcare in Guatemala through reflective ethnography. This volume offers a nuanced portrait of the effects of healthcare privatization for indigenous Maya people, who have historically endured numerous disparities in health and healthcare access. The collection provides an updated understanding of medical pluralism, which concerns not only the tensions and exchanges between ethnomedicine and biomedicine that have historically shaped Maya people’s experiences of health, but also the multiple competing biomedical institutions that have emerged in a highly privatized, market-driven environment of care. The contributors examine the macro-structural and micro-level implications of the proliferation of non-governmental organizations, private fee-for-service clinics, and new pharmaceuticals against the backdrop of a deteriorating public health system. In this environment, health seekers encounter new challenges and opportunities, relationships between the public, private, and civil sectors transform, and new forms of inequality in access to healthcare abound. This volume connects these themes to critical studies of global and public health, exposing the strictures and apertures of healthcare privatization for marginalized populations in Guatemala.
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.