App-solutely healthy in India: Entrepreneurial imaginaries, materialities, and future-making in digital health technologies

This thesis is an anthropological study of future-making in digital health technologies (or simply, digital health). It asks how and what future socialities are imagined by those who inhabit the sites of design and production of digital health. The bulk of its ethnographic material borrows from my year long, daily, immersive participant observation at a health app start-up in India, working alongside interlocutors as both practitioner and researcher. Following wider entanglements and networks out of the start-up, the project’s other significant ethnographic registers include hospital visits with the country’s apex authority tasked with setting up digital health infrastructure, as well as attending health/technology conferences. The thesis advocates the analytical benefit of approaching future-making by digital health as an assemblage, organised by desired futures that its materialities render evident. At a national level, these futures assume the form of entrepreneurially-infused imaginaries, two of which the project speaks to: one advancing technology as messianic, and the other reiterating a particular idea of the Indian nation and its place in the world. In the health app start-up, these emic imaginaries scaffold (albeit indirectly) the promise: an animating heuristic, a futural rationale that is encoded within the socialities of design and production. For the health app’s users or clients, the promise actualises as affective socialities of becoming, predicated on ideas of the good life and/or wellbeing. In turn, these are delivered to them by the health app through curations and performances of intimacy, figuring the app as an evocative object. The result is that digital health can be seen as collapsing the distinctions between the analytical conceptualisations of the body, as individual, social, and body politic, giving rise to a new form of healthism. Here, in seeking to remedy a concern, digital health engenders additional issues and solutions where it is often but technology that is yet again positioned as the vehicle of redressal. Ultimately, the kind of anthropology this thesis does is that of cultural critique, its larger ambition rooted in presenting and contributing to alternative readings of digital in/and the Global South, reaffirming critique as a way of knowing.