Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I enjoyed some of the readings from this week. Many things caught my attention that I did not know before or was unaware of. For instance, I thought the Tuskegee experiment was the key to Black people not trusting White medicine or treatments. But then I read about how medical racism goes back at least 100 more years before Tuskegee. I read in horror how three Black women were operated on over 30 times without anesthesia. I read about how Black men were buried up to their shoulders to test the affect of prolonged exposure to sun, and how the Tuskegee experiment should be called the U.S Public Health Syphilis Study. It is depressing to see how the politics of cultural identity use race and ethnicity to the advantage of the White people. Education about such issues sounds more like assimilation than aculturation. "In the United States, race allows us to define the problem within a historical context, whereas ethnicity provides us with the cultural identity framework for affirming m

I found myself truly engaged by the readings this week. The readings spoke to a part of me that I never really knew existed. The semi-militant( I use this lightly...no need to call the authorities), angry at the state of being, activist mustered up the strength to finally be seen. Perhaps this was a part of me that has been dormant because of the lack or rather seeming lack of outlets to express such feelings of discontent with the state of politics as it affects culture and health. Last summer I did an independent study on the unintended effects (UE) health campaigns and some of the litereature pointed to the focus on individual behavior change in campaigns as potentially harmful especially in urban, ethnic minority populations. The argument that followed chastised the current establishment for blaming the individual for adverse health outcomes. What followed was an elaboration on the impact of sociocultural, societal, and environmental factors on health. I saw this theme inter

From my piece on Performativity and the Third World academic Today we were talking about issues of health and gender in South Asia in this one graduate seminar I am attending. The teacher, a recently minted PhD from a midwestern university, a White woman, stood in front of the class and eloquently discussed the primitiveness of South Asian cultures that are steeped in patriarchy and age old values. She talked about how these cultures needed to be changed, and the role of interventions in bringing about such change. She talked about the lack of agency of South Asian women and how they needed empowerment (of course, by the White saviors embodied in the dominant paradigm of development and health communication who only knew too well the so called strategies to develop and uplift). Then she went on to discuss examples of empowerment-based campaigns that have changed the terrain of the Third World, and brought about development. Her triumphant note articulated their (West-centered agents of

When I came to graduate school in the mid 90s and started learning about many of the health communication theories by reading the empirical literature, I was taken aback by the number of studies that were published out of samples in US classrooms. These were theories tested by scholars embedded in Eurocentric hegemony and were tried out through tests on subjects who were embedded within the same hegemonic configurations. In contrast, the number of concepts and theories that were advanced by scholars from elsewhere or were developed through methodologies that were open to engaging with alternative publics were simply absent. The lopsidedness of the voices that made the knowledge claims and that served as the building blocks for making these claims in the backdrop of those that were absent was initially jarring. I must say that I continue to be jarred by this lopsideness even after having survived the academia for over a decade and for perhaps having risked being co-opted through the pro

My first book "Communicating Health: A Culture-Centered Approach" published by Polity is getting ready to be launched into the market. It should hit the UK and the US in November/December. I outline the key theoretical and methodological assumptions of the culture-centered approach in the book. Key points are illustrated with examples from a variety of contexts across the globe.

Very often in health and development communication efforts targeted at the Third World, we hear our First World colleagues say things such as "We ought to be able to judge certain practices as inherently bad, ought we not?" Take for instance the Taliban's treatment of women in Afghanistan. According to these colleagues, we ought to be able to critique the Taliban and it's treatment of women. One of the things I would however like to point out in this context is that it was after all this impetus for freeing the women of Afghanistan from the Taliban regime that played out in US war efforts in Afghanistan. That the Taliban's treatment of women needs to be critiqued is a legitimate point. I would, however, like to add to this criticism by further suggesting that we also ought to locate our critique of the Taliban and its practices within the broader sociohistorical context of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the role of the US in equipping the warlords in A

Many of the public diplomacy initiatives targeted at the Middle East focus on "winning the hearts and minds" of the people of the Middle East. To the extent that the objectives and strategies of public diplomacy initiatives are built around the goal of winning the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East, such initiatives are most likely destined to fail. This failure is inherent in the emphasis on persuasion built around top-down agendas directed at changing the attitudes and opinions of the targets of the message so that they would be more closely aligned with the goals of the sender of the message. Inherent in the idea of winning the hearts and minds is the notion of wanting to change the receiver of the message so that they would be more closely aligned with the sender's agendas. In the context of US public diplomacy efforts, the goal is to ultimately create positions of support for (a) US policies, (b) US corporations that might operate in the Middle East, a