Johanna Crane's new book goes well beyond a provocative title, and is quickly gaining traction. Consider that at a recent conference in Cambridge on scientific capacity in Africa, the book was mentioned on nearly every panel, without the author being present. So, if you work in the field of global health, or are medical anthropologists or medical historians of Africa, you should be reading this book. You may have bones to pick with Crane once you have finished reading, but are unlikely to feel your time has been wasted. The book focuses on the entanglements of Western science and African bodies, the metissage of money, medicine, poverty, and disease that currently characterizes American global health efforts in Uganda. Crane describes it as an ‘ethnographic examination of the ways in which global health science both generates and relies upon inequalities, even as it strives to end them’ (p. 7). She examines the production of knowledge by studying the linked sites of Uganda and the United States. The book ‘rests on the premise that AIDS in Africa has been not only a source of tragic misfortune and death, but also fodder for profound institutional and intellectual opportunities’ (p. 7).
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Melissa Graboyes (2014) studied this question.