Medicine Anthropology Theory 6 (4): 127–141; https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.6.4.642. © Abigail H. Neely, 2019. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. INTERVENTIONS Worlds in a bottle An object-centered ethnography for global health Abigail H. Neely Abstract In this article, I call for an object-centered ethnography to illuminate the ontological multiplicity that marks the worlds of health and healing that people inhabit. Focusing on a sports-drink bottle filled with a remedy from a faith healer in rural South Africa, I explore the ‘partial connections’ that link the world of global health and the world of traditional healing through objects and bodies. Drawing on medical anthropology focused on global health and medical pluralism as well as scholarship from the ontological turn, I argue that global health programs are limited by their failure to recognize the ontological multiplicity their target populations inhabit. Keywords global health, ontology, South Africa, ethnography, multiplicity In December of 2015, we stopped at a mountainside homestead in a rural area locally known as Pholela in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This was the place where I had been conducting research with Thokozile Nguse, my long-term research assistant and collaborator, since 2008. It is a place on the margins of global health interventions, where international donors fund pharmaceutical treatments for diseases like HIV/AIDS and where the billboards put up by nongovernmental organizations remind people that practicing safe sex is the key to preventing its transmission. In 2015, we were conducting a survey about access to health