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Greetings Israel Society for History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science,
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Table of Contents
H-HistGeog: New posted content
H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
H-HistGeog: New posted content
Seeking historians of geography to write books for Trans Studies, a book series published by Bloomsbury Academic. Increasingly in the United States and elsewhere, transgender and nonbinary people are encountering actions that threaten their basic rights because of their gender identities, exemplified by efforts to erase trans identities by the Trump administration. To understand these contemporary issues, we need to reflect on the interplay of space and time in identifying and understanding nonnormative gender identities and experiences as they have been expressed across historical periods in diverse environments and cultures.
Bloomsbury has a long history in publishing vital books in geography, and its Gender & Sexuality Studies list pioneers the publishing of leading scholarly research from marginalized gender identities and sexualities across global and transnational contexts, including vital works on LGBTQIA+ topics.
High priorities for the series include books that provide intersectional perspectives, as well as works that examine the history of concepts about being transgender and nonbinary with reference to particular geographies. We encourage authors from around the world to contribute to the series, incorporating culture-specific insights as feasible.
To propose a book for Trans Studies, please complete this form and submit it to General Editor Douglas Vakoch (dva...@meti.org) and Senior Acquisitions Editor Courtney Morales (Courtney...@bloomsbury.com). Please include your CV, a list of five to seven potential reviewers you do not know personally, and a sample chapter. If you do not have a sample chapter for the book, please include a previous writing sample written in the same style that you envision for the book.
On the form, list the highest degree for each author, editor, and chapter author. We seek books written by scholars who have completed their PhDs. For edited volumes, all chapters should have at least one author who has already completed their PhD.
Contemporary and historical works are equally appropriate. Books in this series include monographs and edited volumes that target academic audiences. We value books that explore socially relevant issues and that both clarify and question the premises of fields outside of trans studies.
All books in the Trans Studies series—whether they are grounded in the humanities, social sciences, or biological sciences—reflect on the assumptions that guide the book’s specific version of trans scholarship. We especially seek works that provide innovative reformulations of the scope and practice of trans studies, including novel methodologies and theoretical concepts that challenge the status quo. We welcome books from disciplines that are underrepresented in trans studies.
All books follow the most recent guidelines for best practices in using accurate and respectful language when discussing transgender and nonbinary people and topics. Key resources to these best practices include GLAAD’s overviews of Transgender People and Nonbinary People, as well as this Glossary of Terms.
Contributors to this series come from disciplines including but not limited to anthropology, architecture, area studies, art, biology, cinema studies, classics, communication studies, cultural studies, disability studies, ecology, economics, education, environmental studies, ethics, ethnic studies, gender studies, geography, history, history of geography, law, literary studies, masculinity studies, media studies, medicine, medieval studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, public policy, queer studies, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, science fiction studies, sociology, theology, trans studies, and women’s studies. Proposals grounded in other disciplines are equally welcome.
Bloomsbury Academic’s Trans Studies book series is based on a three-fold commitment to:
- Provide inclusive, global representation of transgender and nonbinary topics and authors
- Challenge assumptions of trans studies and other fields
- Engage diverse disciplines from the humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences
Contact Email
dva...@meti.org
H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Morales, Gabriela Elisa. Decolonizing Medicine: Indigenous Politics and the Practice of Care in Bolivia. : Stanford University Press, 2025. 282 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781503640856.$28.50 (paper), ISBN 9781503642720.
Reviewed by
Kate M. Centellas (University of Mississippi)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (October, 2025)
Commissioned by
Kathryn D. Lankford (Arizona State University)
Printable Version:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61888
In this heartbreaking book, Gabriela Morales examines what happens when the best-laid policies and plans for “decolonization” of health care collide with the messy, contradictory, and tenacious material realities of implementation. In this detailed ethnographic study of healthcare reform under Evo Morales and the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) during his apex of popularity and power in the early to mid-2010s, Morales carefully demonstrates the gap between the stated goals and ideals of reform and their enactment in locations and through people that have their own histories, perspectives, and constraints. That is, when policies hit what I started thinking of as “sticky infrastructures,” their consequences and outcomes are unpredictable, even at cross-purposes with intent. As such, this book is an illustration of the need for ethnographic engagement and analysis.
Morales’s take-home point is that “health interventions ended up reinscribing, rather than challenging, long-standing colonial modes of care,” (p. xiii), in part mediated through what she terms warm care: “a cluster of moral, material, and affective care practices centered on a project of inclusivity, cultural sensitivity, and generally humane forms of attention,” (p. 4). She finds that all too often warm care was simply window dressing, a scrim overlaid on relational dynamics and hierarchies that were established via colonial processes of subject making. So, despite the lofty goals of “decolonizing” medicine and pivoting to a more pluralistic and egalitarian model, as described by various MAS bureaucrats in interviews with Morales (chapter 1), in practice these changes were implemented piecemeal, dependent on staff in particular hospitals, funding constraints, and other expected yet frustrating limitations. As such, the reforms that did stick were often only partially enacted in practice—for instance, the culturally adapted birthing room was only sometimes used, or only parts of it utilized, in Machacamara; the pseudonym for the hospital where Dr Morales did most of this research; or the way in which patients were brought into the biomedical clinic to see naturistas, but this served to biomedically surveil, document, and categorize their bodies and ailments.
The book is structured in six chapters, plus a preface, introduction, and a conclusion. The preface begins by acknowledging the rapid shift in the political and medical landscape in 2022 in Bolivia—the “double pandemic” of a violent change in government after Evo Morales’s resignation in 2019, followed almost immediately by the COVID-19 pandemic—compared to the mid-2010s period, when the promises of decolonization and a radically new medical system were still resonant and optimistic. She then argues for critique as a generative process as part of decolonial praxis. The introduction engages with many Bolivian and other decolonial scholars who are often not centered in anglophone writing (Aníbal Quijano, for example) and provides a succinct summary of what the MAS project was in Bolivia.
Chapter 1 focuses on the historical context of MAS health care reforms via the lens of interviews with MAS bureaucrats and attendance at meetings that were all focused on various health reform initiatives. It is here where the first disjuncture in practice emerges: Part of the MAS reform plans involved yet more biomedical technology, bureaucratic processes and documentation, and more categorizing of people at home health care practices. As Morales notes, these are the very same technologies that are necessary for colonial exploitation and capitalist standardization and alienation. Chapter 2 focuses on how young physicians, many of whom are from Aymara ancestry but have been whitened by access to education and urban living, are trained to provide “warm care” under the new state model of health care access. She argues that warm care reinscribes the very processes it seeks to undo (p. 91), and this is due to how “habituated modes of care remained tied to wider social structures of race and class hierarchy as well as the material distribution of resources” (p. 96).
Chapter 3 focuses on the “culturally adapted” birthing room in Machacamarca (and other rural hospitals) and how it was used and experienced in practice. Here, Morales examines “temperature as an ontological, material, and sensorial element” (p. 101) and how embodied experience of the cold and warmth in the Altiplano is linked to various non-biomedical (and biomedical) ailments. She also discusses the complicated roles parteras and other healers have within the hospital itself, arguing that they are tolerated only as long as they do not threaten the authority and centrality of the biomedical approach. Chapter 4 extends her argument around affect and relationality in the clinic. She argues that a key form of recognition—and therefore care and healing—in many Aymara communities is due to “anticipatory relations that [she] call[s] embodied redistribution” (p. 133). In this chapter, she discusses the commodification and centralization of healing—including MAS initiatives to train, professionalize, certify, and verify various non-biomedical practitioners, giving them a sort of institutional authority, but one derived from bureaucratic-capitalist logics—vis a vis moral imperatives of redistribution of resources and flow across/through space and time, and the various “double binds” (p. 146) Indigenous people experience, particularly around capital accumulation versus claims for/about authenticity and morality.
The final two chapters focus on relationships, the expectations of kinship, health bureaucracy, and complaint. Chapter 5, by examining the door-to-door household surveys that were part of health care reform in Bolivia. Despite being launched as part of a decolonial project, this bureaucratization and documentation of health care led to more families, particularly very rural ones, being brought into the purview of state interventions. These surveys often included kinship diagrams, forcing health workers to reckon with the different forms of kinship in rural Altiplano communities, and the kinds of long-standing reciprocal obligations that come with kinship, obligations that are not always upheld or even recognized by health workers, thus perpetuating pathologization of Indigenous bodies and lifeways. This chapter segues well into the final substantive chapter, on complaint and political power. Using Ahmed’s conceptualization of complaint, Morales traces the way in which patients, community members, and doctors often would renegar, a locally legible form of political complaint. It is in this chapter that the slippages between the promises of revolutionary change, their messy, slow, and contradictory implementation, and the growing frustration of the people whom these changes were to benefit are highlighted.
By the end of the book, then, the heralded proceso de cambio has led to scores of unfulfilled promises; a reinscription of certain kinds of authorities, modes of power and knowing, and racialized assumptions; and significant frustration among all involved. Which is why the book is so heartbreaking. If, as is suggested in the book, the Evo Morales plan for sweeping and radical health care reform was the best chance to change the very grounds of what counted as health care and health practice in Bolivia as part of a decolonial project, what does it mean that these reforms have only been piecemeal, incremental, and contradictory? What does that bode for other ambitious attempts at reform elsewhere? And can we even hope for rapid, radical change?
Perhaps we have to sit with ambiguity, contradiction, and the slow pace of unmaking the sticky infrastructures initially formed during colonialism, which took centuries to institutionalize. Radical reform, as the book suggests, does not happen over the span of a few years or even a decade, and it is often constrained by the same forces that led to such inequities in the first place: legacies of colonial exploitation, racism, and continued extraction of the majority for the benefit of the global minority, with “revolutionary” bureaucrats and politicians eventually slipping into the same exploitative and corrupt practices they initially and rightly critiqued. Does that mean we should throw up our hands and give up? Or rather should we take up, as Morales suggests, critique as a way to hone reforms by actively engaging in relationships with those impacted by them, and acknowledge that at times reform is two steps forward/one step back; is never perfect or complete? After all, who gets to say what a fully realized decolonial project looks like? When it is reached? Is that ever possible, or is it always processual, iterative, with new forms of relationality and subjectivity that do not rely on appeals to a kind of unreachable authenticity but rather to active agency emergent from deeply relational and less individualized practices?
Perhaps, then, a solution lies in the deeply embedded, reciprocal, and ongoing care relations that many in Machacamarca expect, but often do not receive, from health care workers. It is not so much about specific modalities of healing, or strict delineations between traditions, but how social relationships and deep forms of care can persist over time and space. This lack of care can be seen too in how the Evo Morales administration ended—with growing anger toward him by many Bolivians due to frustration with what they perceived as ever-more-obvious corruption, and a growing economic crisis. This crisis has only worsened, with inflation reaching its highest level in forty years, food shortages, gasoline shortages, a measles epidemic (in part due to plummeting vaccination rates during and after COVID), and lack of supplies at hospitals and health clinics. Sadly, and perhaps predictably, the politicians promising radical change wound up reinscribing old patterns and centering personal gain versus ample and ongoing reciprocal obligations. Some of the politicians who promised more accountability, more resources, and greater transparency as part of the proceso de cambio wound up clinging to power, with closed circles of allies, and themselves deserving of critique as the cracks in the project became too great to repair.
Citation:
Kate M. Centellas.
Review of
Morales, Gabriela Elisa.
Decolonizing Medicine: Indigenous Politics and the Practice of Care in Bolivia.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2025.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61888
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
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