ABSTRACT
Health care, conceived broadly as institutionalized as well as non-institutionalized forms of tending to sickness and health, is undergoing transformations at a high speed and with unprecedented outcomes. Accelerated global flows of medical goods and services, ongoing economization of health in the context of cutbacks of health-related public expenditures, demographic changes and the ‘greying’ of societies, as well as new and re-emergent pandemics affect the health care landscapes in the 21st century. In addition, new actors in health care policy making emerge, and we are confronted with a professionalization of ‘traditional’ healing services. Moreover, the ready availability of vast health information via the Internet, social networks, and other currents contributes to and is part of rapidly changing health care constellations. This edited volume brings together medical anthropologists who describe these transformations with a focus on the new socialities and subjectivities that emerge. Their contributions were presented at the seventh biannual conference of the Medical Anthropology At Home (MAAH) network, held in 2012 in Driebergen, the Netherlands, which was hosted by the Social Science and Global Health research priority of the University of Amsterdam and led by Bernhard Hadolt and Anita Hardon. The conference was held in honour of Els van Dongen, who launched MAAH with a conference in the Netherlands in 1998 and who passed away in 2009.
