SKILLINGEN, BRODEREN OG TABLETTEN: Penge og sundhed i det østlige Uganda

Resumé

Complaints about fees at the government health facilities in Uganda are incessant, and

so are the more general statements about lack of money and problems of poverty. These

complaints, however, cannot be reduced to questions of cost and the availability of

resources. We also need to look at the kinds of exchanges money is made part of.

Health has long been part of the economic sphere in Uganda, and people compensate

healers and practitioners of different kinds for their services. The article explores why,

then, people experience it as far more problematic to pay for treatment in the public

health care system than to pay other health care providers. To answer this question

requires a discussion of money, not as destructive to social relations, but as creative

potential for relationships in all spheres of everyday life. In Uganda, as elsewhere,

money can be used both to pay somebody and to give somebody something. Money is

being made part of different modalities of exchange. In order to understand what takes

place in various kinds of clinical interaction we need to look at the complex intersection

of social relations, modalities of exchange, and the objects exchanged.