Britt Halvorson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226557120
- eISBN:
- 9780226557434
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226557434.003.0003
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
This chapter investigates how the medical relief endeavor converts waste into value for the broader global marketplace of biomedicine, creating an uneasy and often contradictory alliance between aid ...
More
This chapter investigates how the medical relief endeavor converts waste into value for the broader global marketplace of biomedicine, creating an uneasy and often contradictory alliance between aid organizations and the inequalities of medical commerce. In the U.S., hospitals discard substantial medical supplies, ranging from pulse oximeters to respiratory tubing, largely due to insurance regulations. Since these cast-offs cannot be used in the U.S. due to risk of legal liability, aid agencies remove them from Midwest U.S. clinical spaces which, in turn, enables hospitals to claim tax credits for their donations and usher in new technologies. One foundational paradox, however, underlies the American supply of medical surplus to Lutherans in Madagascar and elsewhere: How do they affirm their moral relationship with foreign brethren through material things deemed by some to be institutional discards, ultimately cast off because of their non-usefulness or obsolescence in the U.S. hospital setting? By tracing how American aid workers attempt to resolve this ethical dilemma, the chapter uncovers how, within faith-based medical aid, different forms of valuation play a role in regulating the transnational circulation of medical discards.Less
This chapter investigates how the medical relief endeavor converts waste into value for the broader global marketplace of biomedicine, creating an uneasy and often contradictory alliance between aid organizations and the inequalities of medical commerce. In the U.S., hospitals discard substantial medical supplies, ranging from pulse oximeters to respiratory tubing, largely due to insurance regulations. Since these cast-offs cannot be used in the U.S. due to risk of legal liability, aid agencies remove them from Midwest U.S. clinical spaces which, in turn, enables hospitals to claim tax credits for their donations and usher in new technologies. One foundational paradox, however, underlies the American supply of medical surplus to Lutherans in Madagascar and elsewhere: How do they affirm their moral relationship with foreign brethren through material things deemed by some to be institutional discards, ultimately cast off because of their non-usefulness or obsolescence in the U.S. hospital setting? By tracing how American aid workers attempt to resolve this ethical dilemma, the chapter uncovers how, within faith-based medical aid, different forms of valuation play a role in regulating the transnational circulation of medical discards.
Britt Halvorson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226557120
- eISBN:
- 9780226557434
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226557434.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
American Lutherans have had a longstanding foreign involvement with Madagascar through pre-colonial evangelical missions that began on the island in 1888 and continued for over a century. This book ...
More
American Lutherans have had a longstanding foreign involvement with Madagascar through pre-colonial evangelical missions that began on the island in 1888 and continued for over a century. This book explores Lutherans’ efforts to institute an aid alliance that departs from the inequalities of the earlier mission work on the island. Focusing on a 30-year-old medical aid program between Lutherans in Madagascar (Fiangonana Loterana Malagasy) and the U.S. (after 1988, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), it provides a close analysis of the tensions among humanitarian activity, capitalism and global religious fellowship. Since the early 1980s, Lutherans have pursued an increasingly common aid model that entails sending from Minneapolis to Antananarivo the often unused medical discards of the U.S. medical establishment, created primarily by planned obsolescence or biomedical innovation. The book draws upon twenty-four months of primary ethnographic research in the Midwest U.S. and shorter research periods in Madagascar among Lutheran clinicians, aid workers, volunteer laborers, healer-evangelists and former missionaries. It develops an approach to Christian aid spaces as “conversionary sites,” or under-analyzed cultural spaces that operate as busy moral crossroads between past and present, as well as between geographically dispersed religious communities and global commodity chains. The book therefore maintains that contemporary biomedical aid from the United States to Madagascar is a multifaceted cultural and historical transaction; it is an ongoing, incomplete conversion of the moral foundation, practices and ways of knowing tied to the colonial legacy.Less
American Lutherans have had a longstanding foreign involvement with Madagascar through pre-colonial evangelical missions that began on the island in 1888 and continued for over a century. This book explores Lutherans’ efforts to institute an aid alliance that departs from the inequalities of the earlier mission work on the island. Focusing on a 30-year-old medical aid program between Lutherans in Madagascar (Fiangonana Loterana Malagasy) and the U.S. (after 1988, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), it provides a close analysis of the tensions among humanitarian activity, capitalism and global religious fellowship. Since the early 1980s, Lutherans have pursued an increasingly common aid model that entails sending from Minneapolis to Antananarivo the often unused medical discards of the U.S. medical establishment, created primarily by planned obsolescence or biomedical innovation. The book draws upon twenty-four months of primary ethnographic research in the Midwest U.S. and shorter research periods in Madagascar among Lutheran clinicians, aid workers, volunteer laborers, healer-evangelists and former missionaries. It develops an approach to Christian aid spaces as “conversionary sites,” or under-analyzed cultural spaces that operate as busy moral crossroads between past and present, as well as between geographically dispersed religious communities and global commodity chains. The book therefore maintains that contemporary biomedical aid from the United States to Madagascar is a multifaceted cultural and historical transaction; it is an ongoing, incomplete conversion of the moral foundation, practices and ways of knowing tied to the colonial legacy.
Britt Halvorson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226557120
- eISBN:
- 9780226557434
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226557434.003.0004
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
This chapter traces the medical materials from the U.S. agencies to their arrival in Antananarivo in the Malagasy Lutheran health department or SALFA. Operated mainly by church elites, SALFA is a ...
More
This chapter traces the medical materials from the U.S. agencies to their arrival in Antananarivo in the Malagasy Lutheran health department or SALFA. Operated mainly by church elites, SALFA is a nationally-run and nationalist aid entity, emerging from the malgachisation of church institutions in Madagascar that paralleled the broader wave of African nationalisms sweeping the continent in the 1970s. Drawing upon ethnographic research in SALFA headquarters in Antananarivo, the chapter describes how SALFA administrators nurture and seek forms of spiritual and material benefit from a range of religious and professional networks in which SALFA itself is situated, such as the fifohazana, their paid employment, ties to foreign NGOs and public/private medical aid partnerships. The chapter views Malagasy acceptance of heterogeneous medical discards from the U.S. NGOs as an act of value generation itself, an actively chosen move by SALFA administrators to create ties irrespective of each castoff’s individual value. Appreciating how SALFA workers restructure the value of medical waste in Antananarivo opens up a space of Malagasy critique of the discard trade, found in a refusal to place primary value in the heterogeneous materials themselves.Less
This chapter traces the medical materials from the U.S. agencies to their arrival in Antananarivo in the Malagasy Lutheran health department or SALFA. Operated mainly by church elites, SALFA is a nationally-run and nationalist aid entity, emerging from the malgachisation of church institutions in Madagascar that paralleled the broader wave of African nationalisms sweeping the continent in the 1970s. Drawing upon ethnographic research in SALFA headquarters in Antananarivo, the chapter describes how SALFA administrators nurture and seek forms of spiritual and material benefit from a range of religious and professional networks in which SALFA itself is situated, such as the fifohazana, their paid employment, ties to foreign NGOs and public/private medical aid partnerships. The chapter views Malagasy acceptance of heterogeneous medical discards from the U.S. NGOs as an act of value generation itself, an actively chosen move by SALFA administrators to create ties irrespective of each castoff’s individual value. Appreciating how SALFA workers restructure the value of medical waste in Antananarivo opens up a space of Malagasy critique of the discard trade, found in a refusal to place primary value in the heterogeneous materials themselves.
