Abstract
For three years, he came to the family home every week to mow, rake, and maintain the garden for which two professionals had little time. Leonard,2 a young Xhosa man, itinerant, uncomfortable speaking English, living in a shack with his brother, and unable to find full time employment, lived precariously. Yet honorable, trustworthy, diligent, and always friendly—even if cannily—he was easy to deal with.
The invisible message of the interaction between professional and client is, “You will be better because I know better.” … Through the propagation of belief in authoritative expertise, professionals cut through the fabric of community and sow clienthood where citizenship once grew.
John McKnight, The Careless Society1
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Notes
John L. McKnight, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 10.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
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H. Malm et al., “Ethics, Pandemics, and the Duty to Treat,” American Journal of Bioethics 8, no. 8 (2008): 4–19.
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Richard K. Thomas, Society and Health: Sociology for Health Professionals (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003), 213–45.
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Lucy Gilson, “Trust and the Development of Health Care as a Social Institution,” Social Science & Medicine 56 (2003): 1453–68;
Lucy Gilson, “Editorial: Building Trust and Value in Health Systems in Low- and Middle-Income Countries,” Social Science & Medicine 61 (2005): 1381–84.
See Susanna Hausmann-Muela, Joan Muela Ribera, and Isaac Nyamongo, “Health-Seeking Behaviour and the Health System Response,” Disease Control Priorities Project DCPP Working Paper No. 14 (Aug. 2003). The DCPP, “an ongoing effort to assess disease control priorities and produce evidence-based analysis and resource materials to inform health policymaking in developing countries,” is a joint project of the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and The World Bank, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (See http://www.dcp2.org/main/Home.html).
Citing A. Kleinman, “Concepts and a Model for the Comparison of Medical Systems as Cultural Systems,” in Concepts of Health, Illness and Disease, ed. C. Currer and M. Stacey (New York: Berg Pub. Ltd, 1986), 27–50. See Hausmann-Muela, Ribera, and Nyamongo, “Health-Seeking Behaviour and the Health System Response,” 6.
Jim Yong Kim, “Beyond Paradigm: Making Transcultural Connectionsina Scientific Translation of Acupuncture,” Social Science Medicine 62 (2006): 2969–72. See also
Joyce B. Flueckiger, In Amnmna’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006).
A. Pickering, The Mangle of Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Marie S. O’Neill et al., “Poverty, Environment, and Health the Role of Environmental Epidemiology and Environmental Epidemiologists,” Epidemiology 18, no. 6 (2007): 664–68;
CSDH, “Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health,” (Geneva: World Health Organization, Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2008).
Paul Germond and James R. Cochrane, “Healthworlds: Conceptualizing Landscapes of Health and Healing,” Sociology 44, no. 2 (2010): 307–24.
See, for example, J. Csordas, “Ritual Healing and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Navajo Society,” American Ethnologist 26, no. 1 (1999): 3–23; John
M. Janzen, Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);
T. Shoko, Karanga Indigenous Religion in Zimbabwe: Health and Well-Being (London: Ashgate, 2007);
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Jürgen Habermas, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Vol. 2, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
See, for example, Christine A. Barry et al., “Giving Voice to the Lifeworld: More Humane, More Effective Medical Care? A Qualitative Study of Doctor-Patient Communication in General Practice,” Social Science & Medicine 53 (2001): 487–505;
Graham Scambler, ed. Habermas, Critical Theory and Health (London; New York: Routledge, 2001).
For a pertinent and profound articulation of these themes via psychoanalytic theory, see Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana, IL; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
Candice Pert, Molecules of Emotion (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 141.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York American Library (imprint: Mentor), 1967);
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Smith (New York: Random House (imprint: Vintage), 1975);
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House (imprint: Vintage), 1979).
Graham Scambler, Health and Social Change: A Critical Theory, ed. Tim May, Issues in Society (Buckingham, UK; Philadelphia, PA: The Open University Press, 2002).
Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003);
Jim Yong Kim et al., eds., Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).
As one example, see Kathryn M. Yount and Joel Gittelsohn, “Comparing Reports of Health-Seeking Behavior from the Integrated Illness History and a Standard Child Morbidity Survey,” Journal of Mixed Methods Research 2, no. 1 (2008): 23–62.
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© 2012 Gary R. Gunderson and James R. Cochrane
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Gunderson, G.R., Cochrane, J.R. (2012). Seeking Health: Persons, Bodies, and Choices. In: Religion and the Health of the Public. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015259_5
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