Global Health
Authors: McKay Ramah 
Published: March 2019

The term global health encompasses a variety of meanings, including the impact of globalization on health as well as threats to health around the globe. In use since the early 20th century, the term has proliferated widely since the 1990s. Most broadly, the term refers to ways of understanding and intervening into health problems and health disparities as they are conceptualized at a global level. The term is most frequently used to describe health issues and interventions in low-income or low- and middle-income countries and to describe the movement of medical goods, technology, expertise, and funding and development assistance from North to South or from wealthy countries to poorer ones. However, these problems and relations are structured by historical and contemporary inequities in how health outcomes are distributed and how health interventions are generated. Because the field has historical roots in colonial medicine and in international health efforts of earlier decades, global health issues have frequently centered on the infectious diseases that were hallmarks of these efforts. As a result, the term global health can signify a variety of conditions and practices. It is used to evoke certain diseases, especially but not only HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria and other infectious diseases, as well as maternal-child and reproductive health and, increasingly, noninfectious diseases. It refers to concerns with (and efforts at ameliorating) disparities in the treatment of these conditions. And it describes interventions, largely enacted through nongovernmental or joint state-private coalitions, that are aimed at treating disease and/or ameliorating these health disparities within a framework that reflects and relies on broader inequalities in access to medical resources. Global health actors include a wide range of institutions including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and academic and medical organizations as well as corporations, public health agencies, and the state. Philanthropic organizations, medical schools and universities, NGOs and development agencies, private corporations and manufacturers of medical goods, as well as scholars, researchers, and physicians, have all worked to implement and define global health over time. Within this field, anthropologists have been centrally involved in defining global health through research activities that make health problems and disparities visible, through work as advocates or health actors working to ameliorate health issues, through work as educators teaching undergraduate, graduate, and medical students, and through critical reflection on the project of global health itself. This entry focuses attention on four aspects of the anthropology of global health, emphasizing 1) how anthropologists have understood the historical development of global health; 2) anthropological discussions of the politics, antipolitics, and biopolitics of global health as they impact theories of citizenship; 3) key themes in the ethnography of global health; and 4) the roles anthropologists have taken with regard to global health, including as practitioners and teachers.