TY - JOUR
T1 - The anthropology of health systems
T2 - A history and review
AU - Closser, Svea
AU - Mendenhall, Emily
AU - Brown, Peter
AU - Neill, Rachel
AU - Justice, Judith
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Madeline Lambert for her work on this review, and the Special Issue editors and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2022/5
Y1 - 2022/5
N2 - Ethnographies of health systems are a theoretically rich and rapidly growing area within medical anthropology. Critical ethnographic work dating back to the 1950s has taken policymakers and health staff as points of entry into the power structures that run through the global health enterprise. In the last decade, there has been a surge of ethnographic work on health systems. We conceptualize the anthropology of health systems as a field; review the history of this body of knowledge; and outline emergent literatures on policymaking, HIV, hospitals, Community Health Workers, health markets, pharmaceuticals, and metrics. High-quality ethnographic work is an excellent way to understand the complex systems that shape health outcomes, and provides a critical vantage point for thinking about global health policy and systems. As theory in this space develops and deepens, we argue that anthropologists should look beyond the discipline to think through what their work does and why it matters.
AB - Ethnographies of health systems are a theoretically rich and rapidly growing area within medical anthropology. Critical ethnographic work dating back to the 1950s has taken policymakers and health staff as points of entry into the power structures that run through the global health enterprise. In the last decade, there has been a surge of ethnographic work on health systems. We conceptualize the anthropology of health systems as a field; review the history of this body of knowledge; and outline emergent literatures on policymaking, HIV, hospitals, Community Health Workers, health markets, pharmaceuticals, and metrics. High-quality ethnographic work is an excellent way to understand the complex systems that shape health outcomes, and provides a critical vantage point for thinking about global health policy and systems. As theory in this space develops and deepens, we argue that anthropologists should look beyond the discipline to think through what their work does and why it matters.
KW - Anthropology
KW - Ethnography
KW - Health policy & systems research
KW - Health systems
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U2 - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114314
DO - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114314
M3 - Article
C2 - 34400012
AN - SCOPUS:85112509813
SN - 0277-9536
VL - 300
JO - Social Science and Medicine
JF - Social Science and Medicine
M1 - 114314
ER -