107 research outputs found
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The Social Epidemiology and Burden of Malaria in Bali Nyonga, Northwest Cameroon
Full text linkMalaria is an infectious disease caused by the anopheles mosquito that kills at least one million people in Sub-Saharan Africa every year, leading to human suffering and enormous economic loses. This paper examines the complex web of cultural, poor socio-economic conditions and environmental factors for the prevalence of malaria in Bali Nyonga. The study outlines and assesses the multiple notions of malaria causation with dirty environment (80.76%) and the mosquito (76.92%) as the leading causes. Other causes are poor hygiene (46.15%), impure sources of portable water (23.08%), malnutrition (15.38%), witchcraft (11.54%), human-vector contact (34.61%),and palm wine drinking (32.69%).It reveals that any effective management of malaria must be based on an understanding of traditional cultural views and insights concerning the cause, spread and treatment of the disease, as well as gender roles within a given community since women bear a greater burden of the disease than men. This study further underscores the need to incorporate folk theories of disease causation, gender and malaria issues into malaria control strategies in order to improve their coverage and effectiveness in different contexts
Cultivating a Troubled Consciousness: Compulsory sound-mindedness and complicity in oppression
Full text linkImplicating oneself in oppression provokes uncertainty, shame and anxiety, and identity destabilizations. Yet anti-oppressive texts often denigrate these experiences, participating in forces I call “compulsory sound-mindedness.” Narratives of three women confronting their complicity illustrate the workings of compulsory sound-mindedness: a white Canadian recognizing the racism in her development work and both a white woman and a racialized Muslim reflecting on their complicity in ongoing Canadian colonization. The three narratives devalue affect, uncertainty, and destabilized identity. They also reveal these denigrated experiences as fundamental to personal-is-political ethical transformation. Compulsory sound-mindedness cannot consistently prevent people from journeying with pain, uncertainty, and coming undone. But when people undertake such journeys, compulsory sound-mindedness frames pain, identity destabilization, and uncertainty as regrettable and without value. I advocate that people cultivate a “troubled consciousness” by journeying with internalized accountability narratives, uncertainties, painful feelings, and destabilizations of a straightforwardly moral self
Work, Health, Music: The enduring Rusyn model of a good life amid changing socioeconomic contexts of progress
Full text linkRusyns in Eastern and Central Europe have experience with two predominant models of “progress”: the Soviet-style communist and the neoliberal. Proponents of each system promised to better the lives of all but did not take into account what “better” meant to local populations, including Rusyns. Increasingly, European governmental and nongovernmental organizations are redefining notions of progress and development to accord with values of sustainability and a capability approach (CA) to well-being. Giovanola (2005) and Robeyns (2005) have argued that scholars of the CA need to better develop concepts of “personhood” and “human flourishing”, and to better explain the importance of social group membership and norms to living a valued life. The emerging anthropological focus on well-being, emphasizing culturally specific definitions of what happiness and a good life mean, can provide these conceptualizations. As a case in point, I use freelist and interview data obtained from residents in the Prešov Region of Slovakia and the Zakarpattia Oblast of Ukraine along with Rusyn cultural narratives drawn from poems, folktales, plays, songs, interviews, and speeches to identify prevalent models of “personhood” and “a good life”. I discuss how these narratives intersect and diverge with discourses of happiness and progress along with the implications for Rusyns\u27 ability to flourish.
Chronic Illness as a Source of Happiness: Paradox or perfectly normal?
Full text linkIn this paper I analyse the relation between happiness and chronic illness from the perspective of medical anthropology and disability studies. By looking at the disability paradox I deconstruct society’s view of people with a disability. I argue that the disability paradox is problematic as it ignores the views of people with a disability. Moreover, such a paradox reinforces the idea that living with a chronic illness or disability is a devastating experience and that happiness and disability are mutally exclusive realities. Based on empiric examples of people who suffer from Multiple Sclerosis I demonstrate that people with a chronic illness can experience happiness in spite of illness, but also as a consequence of it.
Alterity In/Of Happiness: Reflecting on the radical possibilities of unruly bodies
Full text linkThis paper examines how fat and disabled subjects may be taught to appear as happy through biopedagogies in order to manage shame and disgust evoked by their unruly, non-conforming bodies. We begin by articulating what we mean by “biopedagogies”. We then unpack how the requirement to be happy feeds directly into a neoliberal agenda, which demands we must take care of ourselves both economically and emotionally in order to be considered good citizens. We explore how, in the midst of the requirement to be happy while living in bodies not recognised as inhabitable, we create and find moments of alterity in/of happiness. Through analysing art by disabled and fat activists and artists, we examine how disabled and fat people find happiness in difference, rather than in spite of it while at the same time, hanging on to rage and dull pain within this alterity of happiness
The Pursuit of Happiness, Stress and Temporomandibular Disorders
Full text linkMismanaging the pursuit of happiness causes negative psychological effects such as stress and disappointment. The resultant stress often manifests itself as psychological and physical health problems. We explore the problems of measuring happiness according to materialistic wealth and demonstrate that misinterpreting happiness can lead to a stress inducing pursuit. The happiness that human beings pursue is often material-based hedonism whereas eudaimonic happiness has been shown to be a by-product of the pursuit of meaningful activities. Pursuing a predefined happiness, the failure to achieve it and the resistance to it can create stress induced psychosomatic health problems; temporomandibular disorders (TMD) are one such example. Masticatory myofascial pain syndrome is a form of TMD that has a strong association to psychological stress. In this paper the research on TMD associated facial pain across different socioeconomic status (SES) groups is utilized to compare an objective, stress related physiological disorder with happiness data. We also discuss how the pressures of pursuing socially determined aesthetic happiness such as conforming to society’s expectations of smile and facial aesthetics can drive people to make surgical or orthodontic changes. This review proposes that pursuing happiness has the propensity to cause not only psychological stress but also negative behaviors. We aim to encourage further scientific research that will help to clarify this philosophical pursuit
The Health-Seeking Behavior of Leprosy Patients: An explanatory model
Full text linkThe way people interpret their diseases/illness and its treatment, or the meanings of these, has a direct impact on the way populations at the community and reagional levels deal with their illness as well as the treatments sought and chosen. Our study sets out to assess the socio-demographic profile of leprosy patients and their health-seeking behaviour. We also explore certain cultural factors hallmarking local, traditional remedial choices and as to how this presents an obstacle to effective treatement and consultation. This said, our study further considers how cultural variations lead to interpreting the signs and symptoms of leprosy, that is, to different ways of seeing symptoms and ailments
Psychocapital and Shangri-Las: How happiness became both a means and end to governmentality
Full text linkIn this paper a paradox is revealed in the politics of well-being over the means and ends of happiness. That paradox, in brief, is that although happiness is argued to be the ultimate end of all governmentality, in order to serve as that end, it first needs to be translated into a means for bolstering the economy, for only that way can a teleology of happiness gain a foothold in a world which prioritizes economic growth as an end in itself. To show this the paper gives a history of subjective well-being (SWB) research, and contrasts it with the politics of happiness in the UK, where SWB has in the past decade been translated into a discourse around the psychological wealth of the nation via the concepts of mental capital (MC) and mental well-being (MWB)
Happiness and the Art of Life: Diagnosing the psychopolitics of wellbeing
Full text linkBuilding upon the idea of a psychology without foundations and on vitalist approaches to health, the paper presents the concepts of ‘joy’ and of ‘gay science’ as theoretical points of contrast to Seligman’s ‘happiness’ and ‘positive psychology’. Defined by Spinoza and Nietzsche as the feeling of becoming more active in the world, joy emphasises the embodied connection between self and world. By contrast, we propose, a defining characteristic of the contemporary happiness dispositif is precisely the feature of splitting the subject from their world; of treating feelings and desires as purely internal, individual and subjective affairs; and of effectively cutting people off from any of their powers that do not correspond to a limited mode of entrepeneurial subjectivity and practice