>Call for Papers - AAA Panel:
>Health and the Politics of Difference: "Culturally Appropriate" Health
>Care in Context
>
>12 March 2004
>
>Over the last 20 years the concept of culturally appropriate health care
>has been gradually gaining popularity in medicine and public health in
>the U.S.  Diverse parties assert the importance of cultural differences
>in the provision of health care, whether in conflicting understandings
>of the therapeutic value of prescription drugs, or in traditional
>healing approaches used to treat illness at home. According to some
>advocates for culturally appropriate care, biomedicine treats individual
>bodies removed from their cultural contexts, where the putative
>"differences" can be found. Others mobilize biological understandings of
>difference to undergird  their arguments. "Culturally-specific" health
>care is intended to address those cultural differences between patients
>and providers that make "standard" biomedical care unavailable,
>inaccessible, or irrelevant to those who differ from the Anglo-American
>norm.
>
>While public health scholars and practitioners have shown avid
>interest in the concept of culturally appropriate health care, medical
>anthropologists have remained largely on the sidelines of these
>discussions. While applied anthropologists have contributed their
>specialized understanding of particular cultures to public health
>efforts to make health care providers more accommodating of cultural
>differences among their patients, anthropologists engaged in re-thinking
>essentializing models of culture have questioned the use of "culture" in
>non-anthropological ways. This panel will provide a broader set of
>frames in which to situate the phenomenon of culturally appropriate
>health care by presenting examples and critiques that analyze the
>social, political and economic contexts in which efforts to make health
>care more "culturally appropriate" are mobilized.
>
>One of the paradoxes of culturally appropriate care emerges from the
>liberal beliefs about equality of access that are mobilized by minority
>groups to justify their different treatment, based on assertions about
>important cultural and sometimes biological characteristics that affect
>their health status, treatment and outcomes. Community organizing around
>health and health care may be a mode of action used by particular, often
>ethnically-defined communities to stake political claims of entitlement.
>Claims about difference may be grounded on constructions of ethnic
>identity that are based on different biologies as an irrefutable form of
>truth. Such claims work from the assumption that public health
>institutions are a material expression of the state's responsibility to
>maintain the health of the people and thus are an appropriate arena for
>political intervention. Using cultural difference as a lever and
>health-care-for-all as the fulcrum, minority groups are able to
>re-position themselves vis-à-vis the state to gain resources for
>previously disenfranchised or marginalized communities. What are the
>ways in which proposals for culturally appropriate health care seek to
>modify medical practice? How is the state's relationship with particular
>populations re-constructed through such efforts? How do these organizing
>efforts contribute to the construction of newly defined communities?
>What happens to the boundaries of such communities when biological
>understandings of difference are mobilized?
>
>The proliferation of discourses about cultural differences and health
>have contributed to the emergence of health as an arena of struggle in
>which the connections between biology, culture and health are the sites
>of competing and sometimes conflicting stories and interventions. This
>panel seeks to bring together a range of anthropological contributions
>to and critiques of the "culturally appropriate health care" movement
>that productively and programmatically recommend new ways to implement
>or understand efforts to make medicine more responsive to cultural
>differences.
>
>Anyone interested in contributing to this panel should contact Dr. Susan
>Shaw at [log in to unmask] Please send your paper abstract by
>March 22, 2004.
>-----
>H-MedAnthro: H-Net Network on Medical Anthropology



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Allison A. Brown
RRTCADD (M/C 626)
Dept. of Disability and Human Development
University of Illinois at Chicago
1640 W. Roosevelt Rd.
Chicago, Illinois 60608
312.413.1588 (V)
312.413.0453 (TTY)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way.    (S. Lem, "The Cyberiad")

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