Your Pocket Is What Cures You

by Foley, Ellen E.

• ISBN13: 9780813546674
• ISBN10: 0813546672
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-31
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal.Your Pocket Is What Cures Youexamines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health.While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies,Your Pocket Is What Cures Youremains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.

Table of Contents

A Different African Health Story

A Brief History of Senegal

Urban and Rural Dilemmas

Global Health Reform in Saint Louis

Market-based Medicine and Shantytown Politics in Pikine

Knowledge Encounters

Gender, Social Hierarchy, and Health Practice

Domestic Disputes and Generational Struggles Over Household Health

Encountering Development in Ganjool

Believe in God, but Plow Your Field

Bibliography

Index

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