Numerous community health initiatives across Latin America have incorporated household surveys as a method to map local illnesses and health risk factors. During the presidency of Evo Morales (2006-2019), Bolivian Ministry of Health officials likewise embraced the adoption of household surveys they called carpetas familiares, or “family files.” Based on research I conducted in a rural, predominantly Indigenous Aymara health district in 2015, I trace how the practice of surveying local households both facilitated and foreclosed the provision of care. Biomedical providers attentively developed maps based on data they collected, coming to visualize and care for the local community in terms of broader risk patterns. Yet survey questions and resulting maps framed risks to health as stemming primarily from Aymara patients’ own household and kinship relations. The surveys also positioned medical providers as objective data-gatherers separate from these relations. In contrast, many patients understood kin relations to be essential to sustaining their own health—and many also sought to facilitate care by asking medical providers to become kin (for example, by becoming godparents). I highlight how, through their framing of risk, the surveys ultimately distanced providers from the idea that health might be something that providers and patients constitute together.
Speaker: Gabriela Elisa Morales
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College. She is the author of the book, Decolonizing Medicine: Indigenous Politics and the Practice of Care in Bolivia (Stanford University Press 2025).