A Salvage Ethnography of the Guinea Worm

This chapter takes the program for the eradication of the guinea worm in northern Ghana as a launching point from which to examine the different epistemologies at work in global health initiatives. It teases out the ways in which the local landscape of health care is changed and imagined through such initiatives, and the ways in which people actively engage with them, transforming biology and magic into heuristics for one another. By collecting remnants of worm stories, traditions still remembered but no longer believed, fading memories, or chance moments, the author in part seeking to critically document a seminal moment in public health—a field with a notoriously short memory—in hopes that the experiences gained from this historical eradication program may hold lessons for future policy efforts. It is also an attempt to create a record of the living guinea worm itself, the human struggles it has crystallized and fragments of stories from the people, politics, and places it traveled through for centuries.