Proliferating Policy: Technologies, Performance, and Aesthetics in the Circulation and Governance of Health Care Reform in Bolivia

Abstract

This article examines the circulation of a national health reform policy in Bolivia. While much of what exists as policy finds its dissemination and implementation in literary and material forms such as documents, pamphlets, and legal papers, I suggest that both documented and performative forms of policy provide openings to aesthetic realization that exceed the staid and stable manifestations of finished forms. I examine the presentations and performances of a national health reform policy, which repeated in different iterations and were represented through a variety of aesthetic strategies throughout the country, such as through slide presentations, vocalization, and images. I suggest that the circulation of policy demands an attention not only to specific forms of dissemination but also to the governance strategies and histories that dictate the aesthetic practices and possibilities through which these media come into life, interpellate audiences, and make possible interactive engagements with its content and implementation. This work can help researchers think critically about policy more generally and raise questions about how to study health policy circulation ethnographically.

Academic visualization study of aesthetic medicine management and related legal research since 2000

“…Furthermore, by employing quantitative methods, they can evaluate the performance of regulatory policies and legal frameworks at a micro level. Inadequate evaluation and performance assessments hinder timely feedback on the effectiveness of regulations and laws, 22 thereby impeding comprehensive optimization recommendations for regulatory policies in the global medical aesthetics market, which is detrimental to the overall health of the medical aesthetics industry.…”

The Anthropology of Legal Form: Ethnographic Contributions to the Study of Transnational Law

“…Across several fields of law, Riles has shown how legal tools and legal doctrine may serve as objects of ethnographic inquiry. Building on these insights, anthropologists have illuminated the centrality of legal form in the transformation of borders (Kahn 2019), the circulation of legal documents (Bernstein 2018), the power of law enforcement (Fuchs 2020), and many other contexts described below.…”

Anthropology of Policy: Tensions, Temporalities, Possibilities

“…Since then, anthropologists have become more confident about the anthropological appropriateness of the study of policy, even as the interpretive turn in critical policy studies has generated a greater use of ethnographic methods within political science and other related disciplines, including geography (Shore et al 2011, Yanow 2011. Anthropologists analyze policy, its production, and its effects in a wide range of institutional fieldsites, many of which involve both state and nonstate actors producing policy to regulate daily life, as in hospital systems and health care (Abramowitz & Panter-Brick 2015, Andaya 2014, Bernstein 2018, Funahashi 2016, Lock 2001, Mulligan 2014, Sharp 2006, Street 2014, Yates-Doerr 2015 and aid and development (Ansell 2014, Bornstein 2012, Elyachar 2005, Ferguson 1994, Halvorson 2018, Li 2007, Mosse 2005. The Association for the Anthropology of Policy was formed as a member organization of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2014 after previously functioning as an interest group, and as of mid-2019 is a medium-sized section with approximately 350 members (https://www.anthofpolicy.org).…”