Books in the Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography series

Todd Meyers offers an intimate ethnographic portrait of a woman he met during his fieldwork as a way to explore the complexity of the anthropologist's personal relationships with their subjects and how to speak of and to someone who is gone.

Abigail A. Dumes offers an ethnographic exploration of the Lyme disease controversy to shed light on the relationship between contested illness and evidence-based medicine in the United States.

Julie Livingston shows how the global pursuit of economic and resource-driven growth comes at the expense of catastrophic destruction, thereby upending popular notions that economic growth and development is necessary for improving a community's wellbeing.

Anthropologist Pamela Reynolds shares her fieldwork diary from her time spent in Zimbabwe's Zambezi valley during the 1980s, in which she recounts the difficulties, pleasures, and contradictions of studying the daily lives of the Tonga people three decades after their forced displacement.

In this ethnography of impotence as a medical and social phenomenon, Everett Yuehong Zhang argues that the recent increase in Chinese men seeking treatment for impotence represents a shift in changing sexual attitudes in capitalist China.

During the first decade of this millennium, many thousands of people in Uganda who otherwise would have died from AIDS got second chances at life. The essays in Second Chances draw on personal accounts and a broad knowledge of Ugandan culture and history to explore antiretroviral therapy from the perspective of those people.

In this ethnography of addicted, pregnant, and poor women living in daily-rent hotels in San Francisco, Kelly Ray Knight examines the myriad struggles these women face, as well as their encounters with social and medical institutions. She asks: what kinds of futures are possible for these women?

Sharon R. Kaufman examines the quandary of patients, families and doctors not knowing the point where enough medical treatment becomes too much treatment. A hidden chain of drivers among science, industry, new technology, and insurance spur this quandary, serving to obscure the ability to identify the difference between extraordinary and ordinary medicine.

The contributors to Metrics use ethnographic evidence from around the globe to evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and the consequences of applying metrics to global health. Now the standard in measuring global health program success, metrics has far implications that extend beyond patients to the political and financial realms.

Zoe H. Wool explores how the most severely injured veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars rehabilitating at Walter Reed Medical Center-whether recovering from losing a limb or sustaining a traumatic brain injury-struggle to build some kind of ordinary life in a situation that is anything but ordinary.