Latin America – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Amaya Perez-Brumer, David Hill and Richard Parker

Picture: Roberto Huczek

To explore the narrowing of the concept of ‘global’ in global health, this article traces how Latin America has held a place of both privilege and power as well as marginalisation in the field. The authors employ a modified extended case method to examine how Latin America has been ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ in understandings of global health, underscoring the region’s shifting role as a key site for research and practice in ‘tropical medicine’ from the mid-nineteenth century through World War II, to a major player and recipient of development assistance throughout the ‘international health’ era after World War II until the late twentieth century, to a region progressively marginalised within ‘global health’ since the mid-1980s/1990s. They argue that the progressive marginalisation of Latin America and Southern theory has not only hurt health equity and services, but also demonstrates the fundamental flaws in contemporary ‘global’ thinking. The narrowing of global health constitutes coloniality of power, with Northern institutions largely defining priority regions and epistemic approaches to health globally, thus impoverishing the field from the intellectual resources, political experience, and wisdom of Latin America’s long traditions of social medicine and collective health.

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By Enrique Dussel, translated by David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego

Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation — and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego bring to us Dussel’s The Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education, the first English translation of Dussel’s thinking on education, and also the first translation of any part of his landmark multi-volume work Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation.

This groundbreaking translation makes possible a face-to-face encounter between an Anglo Philosophy of Education and Latin American Pedagogics. “Pedagogics” should be considered as a type of philosophical inquiry alongside ethics, economics, and politics. Dussel’s pedagogics is a decolonizing pedagogics, one rooted in the philosophy of liberation he has spent his epic career articulating. With an Introduction by renowned philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff, this book adds an essential voice to our conversations about teaching, learning, and studying, as well as critical theory in general.

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By Gustavo Lins Ribeiro

To open new disciplinary imaginings, we must reinvigorate the relationship between utopian and anthropological thought. This is already underway in efforts to decolonize knowledge. Though such efforts have different emphases, they are located within a field of ideological and utopian struggles that must be understood in the context of imperialism-colonialism, of subalternized subject positions, and of the armed and cognitive struggles that imperialism-colonialism has entailed. Based on my Latin American positionality, I analyze the decolonization of anthropological knowledge as part of this wider field and of the discipline’s history of reexamining itself. In a critical dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial thought, I propose postimperialism as a framework that aims to deimperialize the world, overcoming the hierarchical positions between hegemonic and nonhegemonic anthropologies. Moreover, a postimperial research program would entail studying how global elites’ power affects those who struggle to end an unfair regime that is destroying the planet.

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Edited By Jennie Gamlin, Sahra Gibbon, Paola M. Sesia and Lina Berrio

Critical Medical Anthropology presents inspiring work from scholars doing and engaging with ethnographic research in or from Latin America, addressing themes that are central to contemporary Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA). This includes issues of inequality, embodiment of history, indigeneity, non-communicable diseases, gendered violence, migration, substance abuse, reproductive politics and judicialisation, as these relate to health. The collection of ethnographically informed research, including original theoretical contributions, reconsiders the broader relevance of CMA perspectives for addressing current global healthcare challenges from and of Latin America. It includes work spanning four countries in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru) as well as the trans-migratory contexts they connect and are defined by. By drawing on diverse social practices, it addresses challenges of central relevance to medical anthropology and global health, including reproduction and maternal health, sex work, rare and chronic diseases, the pharmaceutical industry and questions of agency, political economy, identity, ethnicity, and human rights.

Tag: Latin America

Latin America at the margins? Implications of the geographic and epistemic narrowing of ‘global’ health

The Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education

From decolonizing knowledge to postimperialism A Latin American Perspective

Critical Medical Anthropology: Perspectives in and from Latin America