Art of interference - decolonizing global health and envisioning horizons

Abstract

In the face of pandemic uncertainty and the intensi-fied struggle against systemic racism, this article argues that medical anthropology is uniquely suited to engage the current moment in global health. This is due to our ethnographic and activist commitment to the body multiple and to distinct hu-man conditions, as well as to the constant recalibration ofthe-oretical and practical contributions to the arts of caregiving. If the idea of intervention implies technological and political fi-xes, anthropology allows for alternative modes of interference: demobilizing ideas of naturalness, destabilizing the common sense of which forms of life our societies and technologies su-pport, and revealing commitments that go far beyond one-off humanitarian rescues and that seek to guarantee health as a right and instantiate social justice. Against the backdrop of growing tension between the technocratic production of hu-manitarian micro devices and the development of an integra-ted science of planetary health, the article also illuminates the urgency of articulating an Amazonian ethics of care.