In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal. ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" examines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health. While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.

This case study examines emigrants from Namoluk Atoll in the Eastern caroline islands of Micronesia, in the Western pacific. Most members of the Namoluk Community (cbon Namoluk) do not currently live there. some 60 percent of them have moved to chuuk, Guam, Hawai'i, or the mainland United states (such as Eureka, California). The question is how (and why) those expatriates contine to think of themselves as cbon Namoluk, amd behave accodingly, despite being a far-flung network of people, with inevitable erosions of shared language and culture.

This case study examines emigrants from Namoluk Atoll in the Eastern Caroline Islands of Micronesia, in the Western Pacific. Most members of the Namoluk community (chon Namoluk) do not currently live there - some 60% of them have moved to Chuuk, Guam, or the mainland US (such as Honolulu, Hawai'i or Eureka, California). The question is how (and why

In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal. ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" examines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health. While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.