Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

After reading an article and remembering a discussion from a previous course, I thought I should post this video.

My take home message from this week's readings was that in many instances focussing on "adapting behaviors" would do much good than focussing on "prevention". Of course, ideally, we should work on prevention behaviors but there are situations in which culture, structure and agency make it difficult to display the preventive behaviors. In such circumstances, an adaptive behavior makes sense.  Lifeskills training, training to negotiate, skill building on taking the optimum decisions within the context are ways in which we promote "adaptive behaviors". Of course I am trying to connect culturally situated approaches with the "behavioral" approaches. Focussing on adaptive behaviors also has a good match with the "prediction" objective; as they are more efficient and achievable.  Consider the oft discussed case of vegetable and fruit consumption as a cancer prevention behavior being advised to the inner city population. Here, we would not...

  This week's readings and the BLOG were a bit challenging for me in the sense, I had not thought of sexuality in this sense and understanding sexuality and relating it to the readings took me some time. Of course, culture and sexuality are related and intertwined. Culture is a meaning making enterprise and so is sexuality, the way we identify ourselves in relation to sex, gender. As a human being, your sexuality is a part of your physical, emotional, intellectual, and social self. It very much influences how we think of ourselves, how we relate to others and our meaning making process in the society. As all of us are different, there is no normative "sexuality but it is a product of the interaction of our gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, identity creation, values and persepectives (again leading towards epistemologies and the cosmology we access in the meaning making enterprise). This manifests in our expectations of how we think a man or woman should behave and...

When we come to you Our rags are torn off us And you listen all over our naked body. As to the cause of our illness One glance at our rags would  Tell you more. It is the same cause that wears out Our bodies and our clothes. The pain in our shoulder comes You say, from the damp; and this is also the reason For the stain on the wall of our flat. So tell us: Where does the damp come from?

This week's readings quite explicitly focused on the theme of resistance. At some point in my life I knew of only one meaning of resistance - armed or violent opposition. And now critical studies have given me more knowledge was understanding of what else can be constructed as resistance. We see resistance in Mallory & Stern's (2008) article Awakening as a Change Process Among Women at Risk for HIV Who Engage in Survival Sex . The authors highlight that one out of every five AIDS patients is a woman, and HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death among African American women. More importantly, such AIDS prevalence seems to be more common among women who are marginalized by poverty drug abuse, and sex trade. The authors implicitly argues how addressing the root causes of such behavior among this population acts as resistance towards further victimization of these women. We then read about the resistive acts of the low income African American young females in Martyn & Hatchin...

"Borderlands are folded over and crossed again, and recrossed. The membranes of the border are of varying porosities, closures and openings, subversions and states of exception, checkpoints and circumventions, surveillances and (in)securities, orders and disorders, fears and displacements, with the Real gazing back from holes in the defences." (Fischer, 2008). This could be a snapshot from a war zone or from an emergency room of the Home hospital. Borderlands are also the places where resistance is enacted.  Dutta (2008) posits that resistance is intrinsically communicative as it communicates certain meaning about social structure. It could be an organizational structure too as Granzow and Theberge (2009) find in their investigation of workers experienced meaningful participation in the participatory project and some of the main barriers to worker participation. Dutta-Bergman (2004a, 2004b), defines resistance as a process of enacting agency in opposition to the structures th...

The first article from the package I read this week was Mallory's article on women at risk for HIV because of survival sex. I was excited to read about this topic as it somewhat feeds into my research area. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I was very disappointed when I was done reading. Mallory's research topic was great and I think the questions asked made a lot of sense, but I was hoping she would present more of the responses from the women they interview instead of trying to press her findings in a more than questionable theory. Also, did anybody else get upset with her figures? Luckily the next article I read was the one by Martyn on 'tough girls' rewriting negative scripts, now that is what I call qualitative research and I was thinking to myself: that's how it needs to be done! I liked the article's thick descriptions and how it presented the topic from various viewpoints. It allowed the reader to be part of their experiences although I doubt any...

I thought this is interesting as we are in health care to some extent. This video is less than 2 minutes long.

In a previous posting, I talked to some extent about a teacher I had in school who died of breast cancer. She never sought biomedical treatment for her disease. She was afraid. She never tried local/ alternative health care in terms of homeopathy or Ayurveda. She went for the religious healing that did not help her save her life. People subscribe to different ideologies and practices for their health outcomes. Their reasons are as varied as the ways they choose. But still, to a large extent the biomedical model has come to dominate the most of the world. As this week's readings elaborate more on this, we find out about the Flexner Report. The Flexner Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by the professional educator Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexn...

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/03/28/health/1194838918148/translating-health-care.html?hp

A couple of interesting questions arose while reading this week. Let's start with Arakelova's article on healing practices in Armenia. Being somewhat close to this ongoing fight for years by being a German citizens and by experiencing cultural clashes between Yezidis and Kurds on a weekly basis, this article was especially interesting to me. At some point, when the article talked about ethno-religious groups, I started to think about the question we had discussed many times before: What defines identity? What does it take/need to be a culture of its own? Can a culture extinguish because the passing on orally of traditions fails? Another topic that evolved in this reading, but also in Kim's article on Korean elderly was assimilation or acculturation. Arakelova talks about "necessitated assimilation". I wondered, after moving to a new country, is assimilation a voluntary, mandatory, or automatic and completely subconscious process? Is it easier for some but nor for ...