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E-book Managing Chronicity in Unequal States : Ethnographic perspectives on caring

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Penilaian

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Living with chronic conditions requires careful, ongoing management, or what Annemarie Mol (2008) has defined as ‘tinkering’. This means continually making adjustments, and not only to the fluctuating symp-toms and moods, but also to the presence and action of the multiple, significant actors involved in the field of care. Anthropological research on chronicity and care has shown that ‘institutional, economic and other circumstantial factors’ have as profound an impact on the experiences of chronicity in highly industrialised settings as in resource-poor ones (Manderson and Warren 2016, 479). Chronic disease, as reflected by Moran-Thomas’s (2019a, 8) work on diabetes in Belize, signals a ‘global story’, while also taking ‘specific shape in each life, family, and nation’. Power differentials, which have crystallised into coloniality at a global level, have enduring effects resulting in embodied social inequalities with transgenerational potential (Kuzawa and Sweet 2009). Thus, processes of health and disease emerge as clear evidence of a society’s contradic-tions (Berlinguer, cited in Menéndez 2015), with care practices undoubt-edly being an integral part of them. Ethnography is ideally suited to addressing these contradictions, and to showing their impact on societies up- and downstream – from social and economic structures down to the most intimate relationships between individuals.Upstream, within the global context of late capitalism, anthro-pologists have documented how contradictions get ‘under the skin’ (Leatherman and Goodman 2011) of specific classes of individuals and populations, and how some ‘bodies’ become more worthy of care than others. Some individuals become invisible to wider society, as in the case of the ‘nobodies’ (Green 2011), particularly those assumed to be ‘dispos-able’ people, such as illegal migrants. At this point, it has become largely acknowledged that social inequalities are the greatest determinants of ill health (Mackenbach 2012): socially constructed, they become embodied (Venables and Manderson 2015; Kierans 2019; Singer and Baer 1995), and often end up in ‘stigmatised biologies’ (Horton and Barker 2010) or despised corporalities. By strengthening racism, classism, sexism and many other ‘isms’, this process further exacerbates the social inequalities that determined stigmatised biologies in the first place. As Lesley Doyal (1983, 23) warned decades ago, ‘the health needs of the mass of the pop-ulation continue to come into frequent conflict with the requirements of continued capital accumulation. This produces contradictions which are ultimately reflected in historical changes in patterns of morbidity and mortality.’Downstream, descriptions of ‘perceptions of care’, ‘individual values, motives of care, gender roles, and relevant life circumstances’ (Manderson and Warren 2013, 180) have provided an equally impor-tant picture of how care relationships and activities are driving forces for what, within the context of chronic conditions, people consider a ‘good life’ or a ‘good death’, themes which are resonant in Kennedy’s and Andrade Neves’s ethnographic contributions on dementia and tetraple-gia in this volume.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

599.95 ABA m

Penerbit

London : UCL Press., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

275 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781800080287

Klasifikasi

599.95

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Human Biological Ecology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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