Anthropology Colloquium is the department’s speaker series that invites a mixture of anthropologists from within and outside of UBC to present their research. This speaker series is scheduled throughout the academic year, typically with a lunch reception in the AnSo Lounge.
Thursday, January 20th 11:30-1:00 ANSO 134
Susan Erikson (Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University)
Global Health Business: The Production and Work of Health Statistics in Sierra Leone and Germany
The global push for health statistics and electronic digital health information systems is about more than tracking disease prevalence. It is also experienced on the ground as means to develop and maintain particular forms of global knowledge, decision- and profit-making that are not innocent. “The numbers” make possible actuarial and audit logics that undergird the management of health at a distance and which are increasingly necessary to neoliberal healthcare schematics. In this colloquium, we discuss how health statistics operate as transnational artifacts in the business of global health. Ethnographic and descriptive data from two very different countries, Sierra Leone and Germany, show how statistics simultaneously are produced and produce the business of global health. In both cases, numbers are not quite what they seem, and shape and are shaped by social, political, and economic contexts. Health statistics are shown to be inextricable from their social milieus, despite operating in global health as if they are freely formed and objective. The talk is based on living and working in Sierra Leone for two years, and anthropological fieldwork in hospitals and other places in Germany over a ten year period.
