Abstract
Intimately connected with political decisions and market concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic is an acute on chronic calamity that plagues the entire world, destabilizing hegemonic biomedical knowledges and practices and revealing the precariousness of public health systems as well as the deep impotence of social safety nets and the fragility of bonds of solidarity that we imagined existed. The article reflects on the challenges posed to social scientists and health professionals in neoliberal contexts and on the verge of autocracy when their methods and key concepts are being called to better account for the complex plots territorialized by the widespread emergency and to cultivate dynamic micro-meso-macro modes of resistance. Thus, analytical tools of medical anthropology and critical global health, such as structural vulnerability, political determinants, racialization, pharmaceuticalization and decolonization of knowledge, can be valuable resources for understanding the present and intervening in it, but are also challenged by the dynamically unfolding reality. Against the backdrop of growing tension between the technocratic production of humanitarian micro devices and the development of an integrated science of planetary health, the article illuminates the urgency of articulating an Amazonian ethics of care.
Keywords:
critical global health and medical anthropology; planetary health; decolonization; ethics of care