When Seye Abimbola first published his essay “The foreign gaze: authorship in academic global health” in the autumn(or spring, if you are from Seye’s academic কর্মভূমি –kormobhoomi – see footnote) of 2019 the global health space organised it into a ‘triangle of people’. This triangle has three nodes : devotees, critical admirers, and detractors. The book The Foreign Gaze (available to read for free digitally and to buy on print) is a collection of 7 essays on the same theme. I use this triangle to organize my thoughts on the book.
For the devoted, the book acts like a concept album, where the essays intend to convey a larger collective meaning then what each essay individually can do. The 7 essays individually demonstrate different instances of how the production, usage, and sharing of knowledge by global health academics is flavoured heavily by epistemic injustice (the back cover uses a more tempered word- ‘peppered’). The book starts with a highly intellectually piece, laying down the foundation for the rest of the book together with a superb reflexivity from the author. In the second essay, Seye introduces his signature concepts of “pose” and “gaze”. Pose refers to where one person stands, and gaze refers to the manner one communicates considering its audience. He uses these to build a powerful case for using Arendt-style “representative thinking” ( as you can see, I am attempting that through the use of “triangle of people”). The third essay is a powerful intellectual criticism of way the field of evidence-based medicine has shaped up. It brings in the much-needed intellectual resistance to the “let us do a RCT to figure out” community within not only global health , but also in the field of development economics. In the next essay he goes on to demonstrate how thinking in two triangles offers enhanced conceptual clarity. He does that in terms of health systems research, but the utility of using two triangles in other domains is abundantly clear to readers (and here I am, still using one triangle of persons for this review! ). The fifth essay is about the knowledge ecosystem in itself- a mark of its extractive nature. It enables readers to recognize how it causes injustice. The penultimate essay is a piece about dignity and agency. It calls upon “scientific communities that are solely not European, or that are not European at all” to examine the choices they make in generating, using, and disseminating knowledge. The last essay builds further on the pose and gaze framework to elucidate unfair practices in global health. The book ends with a Conclusion, about which I shall mention nothing of in this review.
As a concept album the book offers readers to relook and reframe not only how they do global health research, but also questions one’s implicit knowledge and worldviews. The tools and frameworks introduced though the essays are surprisingly simple – but powerful. At the end of it, like all good concept albums, it makes one want more- but the reflections are a lot to process too.
For critical admirers, the concept album nature of it offers insights on the pose and gaze of one of the most influential thinkers in global health. I suspect that with this book, some in this camp might jump ship and become devotees. I reckon different critical admirers would look at the book differently. I identify with the camp and found the lucid nature of the essays, together with the tools for questioning our implicit knowledge important- together it makes the book really powerful. It constantly reflects the tension between one’s allegiance between মাতৃভূমি and কর্মভূমি (now is the time to definitely read the footnote, if you have skipped it earlier!). Seye’s intellectual honesty throughout the book is really praiseworthy, especially considering in the times we live in. It is a quality which if it was a species, would have been marked endangered. The book is a critical decolonial piece and offers gaze and pose as key concepts to undo epistemic injustice. While Seye and me, both agree on the need to build a critical mass of people to disarm epistemic injustice, I have laid relatively more stress on the need to focus on recognising the deeply feudal structure of global health , and for radical reclamation of space, and challenging narratives around centre-periphery. The book made me reflect on what I see as the way forward for understanding and disarming the nature and structure of epistemic injustice (related piece in PloS NTDs)- the similarities, and the differences.
That brings us to the last group of persons – the detractors. The raison d’être for the book is to make detractors rethink their pose and gaze. Understanding reception by the detractor community has been an impossible “representative thinking” for me. But I suspect, that if one does manage to get a detractor to read the entire book – there would be at least few aspects of agreement. If not, there is need to come up with an intellectually superior set of arguments. I wait to see.
Footnote : কর্মভূমি (kormobhoomi) in Indian philsophy implies implies the land where one performs their actions and duties (from Karma meaning “actions”, and Bhoomi meaning “land”), which serves a markedly distinct purpose from মাতৃভূমি(matribhoomi – the motherland), the land where one is born.
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