Description:

Have you ever wondered what global health work is like on the ground, in the places where it’s done? Then this book talk is for you! Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initiatives, many are implemented within non-religious institutions on the ground. In this talk, Pierre Minn discusses his new book Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti (Cornell University Press, 2022). He focuses in particular on the work of Haitian health professionals who often are charged with implementing interventions and humanitarian aid programs.

Based on ethnographic research in Haitian hospitals, Where They Need Me examines the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrative staff are hired to carry out these global health programs, distribute or withhold resources, and produce accounts of interventions' outcomes. In their roles as intermediaries, Haitian clinicians are expected not only to embody the humanitarian projects of foreign funders and care for their impoverished patients but also to act as sources of support for their own kin networks, while negotiating their future prospects in a climate of pronounced scarcity and insecurity. In Where They Need Me, medical anthropologist Pierre Minn argues that a serious consideration of these local health care providers in the context of global health is essential to counter simplistic depictions of clinicians and patients as heroes, villains, or victims as well as to move beyond the donor-recipient dyad that has dominated theoretical work on humanitarianism and the gift.

Pierre Minn is an associate professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Social and Preventive Medicine at the Université de Montréal.