6th Global Conference
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Monday 9th July - Thursday 12th July
2007
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 2: Health, Illness and Disease in Social Context
Chair: Harold Schweizer
Biophelia and Passionate Sociology: Tools for Making
Sense of Health, Illness and Disease
Maya
Gislason
School of Social and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, United Kingdom
Global
climate change, the threat of a global flu pandemic, and ecosystem contamination
draw attention to the ecological dimensions of human wellbeing. Contestations
to knowledge that links human and ecological health are, however, frequent
and often expressed within public health debates about infectious disease
prevention and control and the role of technology within medicine and
health care provision. Making gains in resolving these debates is confounded
by profound disagreement about the nature and implications of human’s
place within Gaian ecosystems.
While the conceptual terms and methodological
tools drawn upon by the natural and human sciences can make conversations
between the two spheres of knowledge production difficult, there is also
a shared philosophical barrier at work. Stephen Buhner suggests that
two wounds limit people’s
ability to apprehend the severity of and find solutions to the human
health crisis. The external wound is the physical product of
living within an increasingly desecrated Earth. The internal wound is
the deep knowledge of the damage humans have caused to the fabric of
life on the planet.
To heal the ‘two wounds’ sociologists
of health and illness have two conceptual and methodological tools at
their disposal. This paper and supporting video footage explores both.
The first is passionate
sociology, described by Game and Metcalfe as a celebration of human’s
immersion in life and a ‘compassionate involvement with the world
and with others’ that involves a ‘full-bodied approach to
knowing and to practices of knowledge’ (1996:5). The second is
biophilia – the love of life or living systems. Both passionate
sociology and biophilia reflect a conscious embrace of
human interdependence with the natural world and offer methods for analysing
social perceptions of the environment, the science and biology of environmental
determinants of human health, and the impacts of human health care and
scientifico-medical practices on the environment.
Multiculturalism and Health: Applied Anthropology
and Migrant Communities in Barcelona
Hugo
Valenzuela García
GRAFO Research Team, Department of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
The
aim of this paper is to present an ongoing anthropological research on
health and immigrant communities in Catalonia (Spain), which bears the
title “Socioeconomic inequalities and cultural differences
in the healthcare context in high priority neighbourhoods in Catalonia”.
The project is at its initial stage and will be developed during the
next two years. Accordingly, more than presenting final results, we will
outline its methodology and research strategies, the general objectives
and some examples derived from a particular case-study, the Pakistani
community, analysed by one of the authors.
The project will assess the
conjunction of socioeconomic situations and cultural factors which might
affect, or are already affecting, health care and the access to it of
a number of immigrant and local communities under possible risk of socioeconomic
marginality. Therefore, an applied and pragmatic goal underlies: to improve
the medical healthcare of these immigrant communities and to provide
the medical staff and public institutions with useful and updated information
about their social, cultural, religious and economic traits and particularities.
This initiative has been conceived and launched within the frame of a
bilateral agreement between the Catalan Health Department and the Department
of Social Anthropology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, as
a part of a major reform policy fostered by the local Catalan Government
and designed to identify the inequalities in health and the access and
quality of the sanitary services in order to increase the socioeconomic
standards of some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the Catalan region
(Cf. Generalitat de Catalunya, 2006).
For the analysis, fourteen
Catalan neighbourhoods have been carefully chosen depending on their
infrastructure, socioeconomic characteristics and the frequency and number
of the more representative ethnic communities chosen for the study: communities
from Morocco, Senegal, Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Pakistan, Romania (Rumanians
and gypsies), and local gypsies. The research team comprises six ethnographers
with previous fieldwork experience among the selected communities, one
medical doctor, and several academic members from the Department of Anthropology.
In addition, some medical doctors and administrative staff particularly
interested in the project cooperate with the researcher in the context
of their daily work.
The Barretstown Experience: Communitas and Liminality
Peter
Kearney
University College, Cork, Ireland
Barretstown Castle Holiday Camp for seriously
ill children is beginning to be recognised as having long-term beneficial
effects on children with cancer, leukaemia and other life threatening
illnesses. Initial anecdotal observations have been substantiated by
psychological studies. The intervention does not fit recognised therapies
from orthodox, alternative or holistic medicine. The presented evidence
suggests the experience is a modern rite of passage. The different stages
ofseparation, transition and reaggregation as described by VanGennep
can be easily recognised. The separation in Barretstown from family and
civil society is remarkably complete. The transitional phase is characterised
by liminality and communitas as
elaborated by Turner. Liminality is a situation of betwixt and between
outside the mundane where contemporary norms no longer prevail. Liminality
facilitates the undermining of any hierarchal order amongst the campers
and the staff. As a consequence communitas becomes their mode of interaction
with I-thou relationships. The switch from an external hierarchal order
to a temporary sacred space of communitas opens the possibility of change.
Barretstown added the dimension of Therapeutic Recreation to an American
camp experience. The Therapeutic Recreation model follows a sequence
of challenge, success, reflection and discovery for the camp activities.
The children choose a challenge based on their abilities. The challenges
are structured to ensure success. The children reflect on their experience
and discover their previously compromised or unrecognised potential.
The symbols of therapeutic recreation mediated by caras (councillors)
and operating in a situation of liminality and a climate of communitas
permit change. The change may be noticed towards the end of camp and
further emerges in the stage of reaggregation as the children are reinstated
into society. The latter stage can only be inferred but reports, letters
and emails on file suggest that the effect is significant and permanent
in some. The Barretstown experience appears to be a life enhancing ritual
process and maybe an imporatant social intervention in chronic severe
childhood illnesses.
© Inter-Disciplinary.Net 2007