Your Pocket Is What Cures You: The Politics of Health in Senegal

by Ellen E Foley

Overview

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 You examines 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 You remains 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813546681
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	12/03/2009
Series:	Studies in Medical Anthropology Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ellen E. Foley is an assistant professor of international development and social change at Clark University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 A Different African Health Story 1

2 A Brief History of Senegal 20

3 Urban and Rural Dilemmas 37

4 Global Health Reform in Saint Louis 58

5 Market-Based Medicine and Shantytown Politics in Pikine 84

6 Knowledge Encounters: Biomedicine, Islam, and Wolof Medicine 96

7 Gender, Social Hierarchy, and Health Practice 115

8 Domestic Disputes and Generational Struggles over Household Health 130

9 Encountering Development in Ganjool 143

10 Believe in God, but Plow Your Field 158

Notes 165

Glossary 169

References 173

Index 181