Health policies and anthropology of life in the Family Health Strategy

Abstract

Anthropology of life can reconfigure the investigation of the dilemmas and challenges involved in the daily life of Family Health Strategy (FHS) policies at the confluence with the decentering concepts such as health, care, and suffering, and multiplying the paths through which both human and non-human agencies pass. The article aims to analyze the Family Health Strategy (FHS) as a policy of life, which implies a descent into everyday life to ethnographically understand the entanglements of collective agencies that shape the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) and beyond. Approaching “life theories” involves reconsidering the biopolitics of populations and biopower from Fassin’s perspective, which warns that if biopolitics implies the dissolution of life into bodies and populations, then we need to reclaim “the politics of life” as a vast biological and material; social and experiential territory that would allow for the inclusion of the ambiguities and uncertainties inherent in the politics of care. This conceptual framework will allow us to re-read the authors’ research in different ethnographic contexts of the ESF over the last few decades.