Publication Date

4-2019

Document Type

Article

Keywords

Guatemala, Health equity, Epidemiology

Abstract

The relationship between public health practice and the fulfilment of the right to health is often assumed to be synergistic. With the goal of understanding how exactly this relationship happens, I studied the everyday practice of epidemiology in Guatemala, seeking to understand how it shapes and is shaped by the notion of health as a human right. Here I present findings from my ethnographic investigation of the Guatemalan Centro Nacional de Epidemiología (National Epidemiology Center), created in 2004 with the explicit mission of contributing to fulfilling the right to health for the inhabitants of Guatemala. While the relationship between epidemiological practice and the right to health is influenced by the specific configuration of local and transnational flows (bureaucratic, economic, ideological, political, scientific, social, and symbolic), epidemiologists also play an important mediating role. There are four intermediate social mechanisms that shape the relevance of epidemiological practice to fulfilling the right to health in Guatemala. Given how the country’s economic and social inequalities translate into enormous health inequities, an epidemiological practice committed to the right to health should aspire to transform, rather than reproduce, the social hierarchies underlying such inequalities. The mechanisms I identified shape how epidemiological practice contributes to the reproduction or transformation of such hierarchies. These mechanisms shape what I call ‘neocolonial epidemiology’, and include: institutional chaos, disciplinary conformism, global health international relations, and social relations at the national level.

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Statement

This article was originally published under a CC BY 4.0 license as:

Cerón, A. (2019). Neocolonial epidemiology: Public health practice and the right to health in Guatemala. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 6(1), 30-54. DOI: 10.17157/mat.6.1.647

Rights Holder

Alejandro Cerón

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

24 pgs

File Size

378 KB

Publication Title

Medicine Anthropology Theory

Volume

6

Issue

978336000

First Page

30

Last Page

54

ISSN

2405-691X

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