Md. Faruk Shah - Biomedicine, Healing and Modernity in Rural Bangladesh

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As a young university teacher in Bangladesh, Md. Faruk Shah sought to continue his studies for a higher degree. His desire was to examine health care in rural Bangladesh. That opportunity came in 2011 via an international doctoral scholarship to one of the worlds top 100 universities: the University of Auckland, New Zealand. In Auckland, his academic home was in the highly ranked Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts. I, a Professor of Social Anthropology, and Associate Professor Susanna Trnka were appointed his supervisors. We continued in this role until Faruk graduated with his Ph.D. in 2015 and returned to his academic position in Bangladesh.

During that time, we supervisors, Faruks fellow students and our academic colleagues learned a great deal about Bangladesh health systems, at the same time that Faruk advanced his studies in medical anthropology and learned about life in New Zealand. I am delighted that the fruits of his doctoral research can now be shared with the wider audience that it deserves. It is a remarkable contribution to how biomedicine becomes localized in a particular time and place, as well as an in-depth critical ethnographic study of health care and health systems in rural Bangladesh.

I agree with a reader ofBiomedicine, Healing and Modernity in Rural Bangladesh, who says: By combining a top down policy-oriented overview with ground-up ethnographic methodologies, the thesis unravels the richly contextual, layered, multi-sectorial and chilling landscape that constitutes modern biomedicine in rural Bangladesh. Initially hearing that poor patients have to pay baksheesh to hospital orderlies to ensure care, I was incensed. But soon I understood from Faruk that orderlies do not get paid a living wage; similarly, pharmaceutical representatives seemed initially to be parasites, until Faruk explained that if they want to remain employed, even with such terrible working conditions, their harassment of doctors and patients is necessary to their survival. The examples could be multiplied: from village doctors dispensing biomedicines with little to no training, but being largely trusted by their suffering, poor patients; to preferential health care for elites; to unnecessary surgeries and prescriptions; to the national context in which Bangladesh promises free public health care to all citizens but does not accord the health system adequate resources. I am astonished by the clarity with which Faruks research participants at all levels talk openly about their apparently unavoidable entanglements in systemic corruption.