Current medical anthropology offers an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of how and why Africans engage with diverse forces that continue to influence their ways of practicing medicine. Expanding their research focus from healers to patients and, since 2000, increasingly to biomedicine, medical anthropologists have deepened our understanding of the intricate though not immediately visible network of connecting, diverging, and crisscrossing healing routes within and beyond Africa.
The articles in this virtual issue address three hot topics: making African Global Health, framing “traditional medicine” and tackling culturalism. The review article (Obrist and van Eeuwijk) introduces and reflects on these topics, drawing on five recent publications and situating them in broader debates of social and cultural theory. The articles previously published in Medical Anthropology and selected for this issue highlight additional facets of these topics. Women make global health through situational networking to gain access to assisted reproduction treatment within Mozambique and transnationally. African states, healers, Chinese medical practitioners, and clinical trials develop and modernize traditional medicine in Tanzania, Ghana, and South Africa. The example of the Lancet and University College London Commission on Culture and Health shows a way forward how culturalism can be tackled through transdisciplinary approaches.