Looking forward to being part of this panel in Race, Indigeneity, Caste, and Health Futures: Perspectives from the Global South at the 2024 American Anthropological Association Meeting in Tampa! More about the panel themes below:

Over the past three decades, anthropological research has established two interlinked dimensions of health: first, biological and social markers of identity (Race, Indigeneity, and now increasingly Caste) are central to health research; and second, identity (Race, Indigeneity and Caste positionalities) shapes experiences of health. While problems in and of the Global South have constituted empirical analyses in this scholarship, theoretical interventions rooted in the diverse realities of the Global South are limited, calling for a decentering of the “Euro-American canon” (Manderson and Levine, 2018). A focus on anthropological praxis, particularly on issues of health, wellbeing, disease and their relationships to social positionality, therefore, demands that conceptual interventions from the Global South assume centrality in anthropological theorizing. It would necessitate ethnographies that demonstrate how categories like Race, Indigeneity and Caste travel across the North-South divide; how identity shapes and is in turn shaped by myriad socioeconomic, biosocial and political contexts; and, how the complexities that arise from these mobilizations open up new theoretical possibilities.

Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown how health innovations travel from the North to the South, often in search of conducive markets and new biomedical research domains (Petryna, 2009; Sunder Rajan 2017; Rudrappa, 2018; Alinechev and Nguyen, 2019). However, the aftermath of innovation needs a more careful and nuanced anthropological analysis: What happens when innovations travel, mapping along the way onto existing social hierarchies, that then encounter the situated lived realities of communities? How do assumptions of objectivity embedded in existing technologies pave the way for ever-innovative heath and biotechnological interventions that nonetheless consolidate universal notions of human difference? How do individuals, communities and experts engage with such interventions? What tensions arise when biomedical knowledge is juxtaposed against local systems of knowledge?

Envisaging an experimental conceptual space informed by ethnographic rigor, this panel invites contributions rooted in lived experiences of health inequities and health possibilities in the Global South to explore the theoretical potential embodied in this scholarship. We invite particularly contributions that discuss the intersectionality of health experiences through the positionalities of Race, Indigeneity, Caste, Class, Gender, Sexuality and Disability. This may include theoretical or empirical papers with a focus on historical, critical medical, queer, crip and feminist anthropology and STS.

The panel further seeks to include authors from diverse geographical locations. The objective is therefore to foster decolonial dialogues on “Health Futures” as radically imagined (Chao and Enari, 2021) from the perspective of the Global South. In the wake of a global pandemic, with the apprehensions of living on a rapidly changing planet, and ongoing wars, this panel will emphasize on the persistent and emerging health problems in the south to offer a chance at reimagining global health.