ABSTRACT
One feature of late modern societies is that they have health care systems, however beleaguered these may be in the present era. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the project of state building required these kinds of institutions. Today, they are also major sites of institutional encounter between migrant populations and host societies—though the provision of health care for migrants is typically a contentious arena of institutional practice, where questions of citizenship status, funding and language sit uneasily beside the idea that health care is a ‘basic human right’. This is true whether countries have predominantly public or private health care systems. In an essay on the anthropology of the state, Trouillot (2003) suggests some conceptual parameters relevant for thinking about these matters and about the special challenges that migrants pose for contemporary societies more generally. His concepts relate to the changing topography of the state and its capacities to regulate the conditions of citizens’ existence, to provide for their social welfare, claim their allegiances, and so forth. This has become particularly acute in an era of neoliberal globalization:
[c]hanges in the functions and boundaries of the national state generate confusions even among social scientists in part because globalization now produces spatialities—and identities—that cut through national boundaries more obviously than before, and in part because the social sciences have tended to take these very same boundaries for granted.
(2003, 84)