Conjuring the State
Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908-1945
Published on 5. September 2023
223 pages
978-0-8229-8997-4 (ISBN)
Description
Winner, 2024 Best Book Prize, LASA Ecuadorian Studies Section
The Ecuadorian Public Health Service was founded in 1908 in response to the arrival of bubonic plague to the country. A. Kim Clark uses this as a point of departure to explore questions of social history and public health by tracing how the service extended the reach of its broader programs across the national landscape and into domestic spaces. Delving into health conditions in the country-especially in the highlands-and efforts to combat disease, she shows how citizens' encounters with public health officials helped make abstract ideas of state government tangible. By using public health as a window to understand social relations in a country deeply divided by region, class, and ethnicity, Conjuring the State examines the cultural, social, and political effects of the everyday practices of public health officials.
The Ecuadorian Public Health Service was founded in 1908 in response to the arrival of bubonic plague to the country. A. Kim Clark uses this as a point of departure to explore questions of social history and public health by tracing how the service extended the reach of its broader programs across the national landscape and into domestic spaces. Delving into health conditions in the country-especially in the highlands-and efforts to combat disease, she shows how citizens' encounters with public health officials helped make abstract ideas of state government tangible. By using public health as a window to understand social relations in a country deeply divided by region, class, and ethnicity, Conjuring the State examines the cultural, social, and political effects of the everyday practices of public health officials.
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09/2023
University of Pittsburgh Press
€53.50
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A. Kim Clark is professor of anthropology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She is the author of The Redemptive Work: Railway and Nation in Ecuador, 1895-1930 and Gender, State and Medicine in Highland Ecuador: Modernizing Women, Modernizing the State and coeditor, with Marc Becker, of Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Encountering Plague, Plague Encounters
- Chapter 2. Forging Public Health as State Idea and State System
- Chapter 3. Reaching In: Waste, Water, and Public Health Services in Quito
- Chapter 4. Reaching Out: Extending Public Health in Tungurahua Province
- Chapter 5. Regulating Pharmacies and Professional Defense in Highland Ecuador
- Conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
