Dr. Ram’s triage: Categorization, speculation, and granting access to global health technologies in Indian private clinics

Abstract

Triage is a process of categorizing potential health and guiding care. It is based on the idea that all bodies are equal while potential vitality is not. I examine the triage processes used by Indian physicians as they collaborated with global health researchers to identify patients for a free, cutting-edge tuberculosis test. As I argue, triage forms and reforms social difference within global health despite its aspirations of standardization and experimentality. Problematizing triage as part of global health’s ordinary affect of affordability reveals local biologies, class biopolitics, and clinical speculation in the field. I conclude by considering new avenues of ethnographic inquiry that are opened by attending to the practiced and depoliticized biopolitics that occurs within clinics as everyday, nonreflexive decisions about how to organize resources and speculate on vitalities.

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