Effective and ethical global-health initiatives involve some acknowledgement of culture - that is, they take into account local practices, beliefs, and circumstances, and they recognize that medicine is not "one size fits all." A recent post on the blog Anthropological Observations takes this one step further, asserting that "culture" should be seen as something that is always changing, rather than a static fact to be accounted for. As a medical and cultural anthropologist pursuing a PhD, I couldn't agree more.
Culture is often seen as a barrier to health by global-health professionals, as in "it's not part of the local culture to visit clinics" or "cultural beliefs about how medication works make patients non-adherent to drug regimens: they take pills when they experience symptoms instead of at regular intervals." Such observations are useful and can help adapt health initiatives to specific locales. However, this attitude can also be paternalistic and limiting because it doesn't give people credit for being able to adapt to new information or situations.
The post's author, Ted Fischer, PhD, a professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University who has been advising the WHO's project on the cultural contexts of health, writes:
A human-centered approach to health and wellbeing should adopt contemporary understandings of culture as dynamic, future oriented, and driven by agency. We in anthropology now see culture as much more of a fluid process, a process rather than a thing. Cultural actors are always improvising, actively creating meaning out of the resources at hand.
He concludes that it is more accurate is to see culture as an opportunity for health, instead of an obstacle to it.
Previously: Exploring the benefits of pursuing anthropology and medicine, What other cultures can teach us about managing postpartum sleep deprivation, Exhibit on health and medicine among indigenous cultures opens at US National Library of Medicine and It's a small world after all: Global health field takes off in the US
Photo by Onasil Bill Badzo
