This article explores what anthropology has to say about contemporary business strategies for market expansion among poor consumers in Africa and Asia. Focusing on the activities of global consumer goods company Unilever in India, we show how anthropology can provide valuable insights into the hidden work and power relations involved in transforming an everyday commodity like soap into a composite object, what we call a ‘social good’, that is capable of simultaneously combating disease, tackling poverty and realizing value for shareholders.

Drawing on ethnographic material from a government hospital in Papua New Guinea (PNG), this paper examines the relationship between power and visibility in two kinds of bureaucratic practice: hospital managers’ performance of institutional ‘transparency’ and patients’ careful management of their government health documents. In both examples, people engage with bureaucratic and biomedical technologies of visibility to entice governing actors to see and enter into a relationship with them. Against dominant Foucauldian theories of power‐vision, the article shows that, in the institutional crevices of a ‘weak state’, bureaucratic technologies operate as relational technologies that elicit affective motivations rather than as disciplinary technologies that transform the self.

Testing programs for COVID-19 depend on the voluntary actions of members of the public for their success. Understanding people’s knowledge, attitudes, and behavior related to COVID-19 testing is, therefore, key to the design of effective testing programs worldwide. This paper reports on the findings of a rapid scoping review to map the extent, characteristics, and scope of social science research on COVID-19 testing and identifies key themes from the literature. Main findings include the discoveries that people are largely accepting of testing technologies and guidelines and that a sense of social solidarity is a key motivator of testing uptake. The main barriers to accessing and undertaking testing include uncertainty about eligibility and how to access tests, difficulty interpreting symptoms, logistical issues including transport to and from test sites and the discomfort of sample extraction, and concerns about the consequences of a positive result. The review found that existing research was limited in depth and scope. More research employing longitudinal and qualitative methods based in under-resourced settings and examining intersections between testing and experiences of social, political, and economic vulnerability is needed. Last, the findings of this review suggest that testing should be understood as a social process that is inseparable from processes of contact tracing and isolation and is embedded in people’s everyday routines, livelihoods and relationships.

Anthropological and STS scholars of biomedical work have traditionally explored contexts where inconsistencies and lacunas in diagnostic knowledge-production are problematic for medical practitioners, and such scholars have consequently focused on the social and political processes by which such epistemic uncertainties are resolved. This article draws on ethnographic material from a Papua New Guinean hospital where diagnostic uncertainty is not rendered problematic and where the open-endedness of the diagnostic process gives rise to new forms of medical expertise and practice. The paper focuses on the medical record as an artefact of not-knowing that both documents and performs uncertainty as a valuable resource. It shows that medical records can operate as either technologies of 'opening' that multiply opportunities for pragmatic action within a hospital space or as technologies of 'closure' that move people and documents between spaces. Practices of not-knowing and knowing are therefore shown to be interdependent and interchangeable 'moments' of bureaucratic-biomedical work.

Single-use, disposable, point-of-care diagnostic devices carry great promises for global health, including meeting urgent needs for testing and diagnosis in places with limited laboratory facilities. Unfortunately, the production and disposal...