A Floating Medical Network? An Anthropological Analysis of China-Burundian Medical Cooperation in the Context of Global Public Health

This study places the transiting meanings and medical practices at the center of global public health. It will focus on the multiple manifestations across the floating network of China-Burundi medical cooperation——the rotating doctors, transcultural communication, and unstable availability of medical provisions. An anthropological approach will facilitate the consideration of both the locality and global interconnectedness: it will investigate what motivates people to choose between Chinese doctors and other health solutions as well as how people envision the global health. With the arrival of global public health era, the meaning and practice move to encompass a variety of regimens of transnational social processes, inequalities, other foreign availability, and local biologies. This study seeks to understand the process through which these meanings and actors become associated to the China-Burundi network. Understanding this process may shed new light on the underlying nature of change in the transnational medical encounter. It will help producing new meanings of medicine and health by studying practices, appropriations, and communications in a global health context and a multi-sited ethnography. This tale of medical network between an inland African country and a developing country rests at the intersection of three scholarships: medical anthropology, public health, and medical history.