Published May 2025 | Version v1
Working paper Open

Fugitive Wellbeing: Thinking beyond/without global health for a future anthropology of health

  • 1. ROR icon Centre for Research in Anthropology

Description

There is a growing call for the decolonization of global health in anthropology. However, there is no agreement on what the decolonization of global health means or on how to accomplish it. In what follows, I outline how global health can be thought of as colonized. I follow this description with my own understanding of what constitutes global health. I then use this adapted definition of global health to assert (in consonance with Adia Benton) why the decolonization of global health is, at best, naive.
Instead of striving for the decolonization of global health, I suggest decentering/displacing global health to make room for alternative world-building projects. I refer to one of these potential alternative worldbuilding projects as fugitive wellbeing. Finally, I provide a brief example of what I mean by fugitive wellbeing (and suggest a starting place for future in-depth research) by drawing from exploratory research in Honduras. Ultimately, I argue 1) that global health is a politically informed project that falls under a larger category of social responses to the dilemma of distribution: networked infrastructures for the distribution of public goods; 2) that our understanding of what constitutes public goods currently shapes the limits of global health; and 3) that our understanding of public goods is in turn shaped by our ideas of the human and the future.

Keywords: Anthropology of global health; decolonization; coloniality of health; health as total public good; fugitivity; Honduras

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Working Paper nº 28 Hasemann.pdf

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Additional details

Funding

European Commission
Racializing Health - Coloniality and Speculation in Global Health: addressing the lived-experience of racialization among Honduran low-income urban residents through their encounters with public health services. 101066593

Dates

Available
2025-05