Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The intersection between communication, resitance and social change is a key point that strikes me as unique in this week’s readings. I am intrigued by this overlap because of incessant conflict between oil corporations and indigenous communities over seismic operations in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The contexts may seem somewhat divergent on the surface in that the readings highlight resistance in health-related contexts. By contrast, the resistance in Nigeria is tied to marginalization with respect to dearth of basic facilities in indigenous communities despite several years of oil exploration and concomitant environmental pollution. Given the overlap between structural marginalization and health, both scenarios provide opportunities for convergence. I use convergence here to mean similarity of prevailing /unfavorable circumstances that trigger agency or resistance from indigenous communities. Nigeria’s Niger Delta region represent the eight oil producing states in Nigeria

In reading Sirisha's post that poignantly addresses the pathologization of the Third in mainstream discourses in the West as epitomized in the Oscar winning productions "Born into Brothels" and "Slumdog Millionaire," I am reminded of a social gathering a few years back. "Slumdog" was released, was an Oscar nominee at this point, and was all the rage in the popular culture circuits. At this gathering, a colleague (you guessed it, Caucasian and male) walked up to me and asked if I had ever really visited a slum, because he referred to an NPR story that supposedly made the argument that it is Indians who haven't really seen the slums that have problems with the movie "Slumdog Millionaire." [Granted that the materiality in the frames of Slumdog do have a base in the deep-seated inequalities in contemporary India, the frames in the movie I would argue further perpetuate these inequities by participating in the circulation of a neoliberal readi

The reading on the Participatory change among the Commercial Sex Workers in both the programs viz., SHIP and New Light Project has created an urge to point out towards the problem of building trust among the people we work with and amongst themselves in programs such as these which aim at bringing a "social change" through the solidarity networks among the community members. The first hurdle that I could identify while reading this piece is about gaining trust among the sex workers. It needs, not a simple effort but a very time consuming and confidence exhausting one. Gaining access to such areas in itself is so tough and this hurdle is further made tougher to cross by the earlier researchers or film makers or whatever they may be who have selfishly used their obnoxious stories for their goals of controversial movies or dissertations and publications in case of academicians or funding agencies. Most of them have exploited these people and left them with no hope for improvemen

This is a comment in reponse to Yogita's well articulated point about history of ideas...sometimes, comments tend to be hidden, so am posting this again. Thanks for referring to the James Scott piece on domination and resistance, as that's precisely where I would like to then build from in attempting to work out my half-baked ideas of social change articulated through subaltern narratives shared at the margins. As policies and programs carried out within the neoliberal configuration and directed at projects of development continually use the Eurocentric vantage point, albeit working closely with the local elite, to put forth specific development programs and policies, the work of contemporary SS scholarship has to reinvent a strategically organized politics that works on change from the margins by fundamentally disrupting the Eurocentric hegemony, and by acknolwedging the legitimacy of subaltern viewpoints that have otherwise been treated as magic and sub-standard by these ve

This is a reflection of a recent experience with a piece I had sent out for peer review. This piece drew upon Subaltern Studies theory to articulate the processes of erasure in the Eurocentric mainstream. One of the reviewers responded to this piece by noting that this argument has already been made in the Communication literature (citing a piece in rhetoric that was published in 2000 by a Caucasian scholar at a mainstream American university). So I went back to the piece with the idea that I had something new to learn, although even on its face, the reviewer's argument did not work as the postcolonial and Subaltern Studies literature predate to arguments made by South Asian and Latin American scholars starting in the 70s. I still wanted to check out this 2000 piece to see if it was indeed citing some of this postcolonial work (as far as I knew, other than the works of Raka Shome, Radha Hegde, Radhika Parameswaran, and some other scholars of Latin American and South Asian origins,

Two key points that got me thinking in this week’s readings include the erasure of women’s breastfeeding knowledge by the biomedics, and the double speaking that characterize breastfeeding initiatives (the chapter by Emily Kripe in Zoller & Dutta). First,I consider the erasure of women’s agency. I begin with a quotation that accurately reflects the plight of women in Third World countries with regard to breastfeeding: “This transfer of breastfeeding knowledge from its practitioners to the domain of medical professional, from being embodied to requiring learning, involves a privileging of headwork that not only reinstalls the mind-body dichotomy of the Cartesian subject, but disempowers women as mothers at a time when their corporeality is most active and symbolically significant” (Barlett,2002,p.376) quoted in Zoller and Dutta (2008). The move to deny women of their agency interests me because of current trend in some developing countries. In Nigeria for instance, Not for Profit

In reading the final chapter of Communicating Health: A Culture-Centered Approach , I found it very helpful to have a complete overview of the entire culture-centered process in research, understanding, and necessary structural shifts. What was also reinforced for me was that this approach is both challenging and critical, especially when one is willing to recognize that erasure has taken place within a marginalized community. However, something also struck me as I read and was reminded that culture is dynamic and that the “values, beliefs, and practices that constitute the culture become meaningful when articulated in the context within which they are realized” (p. 256). Of course, this definition has been a common statement made in our weekly discussions. But, how it was substantiated for me this week as I read it again comparing it to a notion I recently read in Charles Tilly’s book Durable Inequality. In the opening pages, Tilly describes James Gillray, who was Britain’s first pr

So here's a story of an immediate experience this morning that relates to the conversations we have been having about structural barriers. As I share this story, let me first share that I am a health communication scholar with a graduate education and with almost a decade of experience listening to stories of individuals, families, and communities about their experiences with healthcare. On one hand, I believe that my education and scholarship have given me the skillsets to ask questions, to engage critically, and to push the envelope; on the other hand, I also believe that I miss many opportunities to ask questions, simply because of the length of the interactions in the provider's office. Today's experience that I will share with you relates to billing. So we had gone in to the physician at one of the Arnett locations for a regular physical. The co-payment was made at the counter ($15), and we walked away with the assumption that the rest of the bill ($128 as I would co

I find Mansfield et al.’s (2002) piece on the intersections of faith in God, healing, and meaning of illness interesting for two reasons. First, Mansfield et al.’s revelation that faith and religious beliefs represent important variables in patient’s healing process is intriguing. They found that: “Many people in this region of the Southern Eastern United States (80%) believe that God acts through medical doctors to cure illness. Almost 9 out of 10 African Americans in this region see physicians as instruments of God’s will” (Mansfield et.al.2002, p.406). As illustrated in the quotation, faith in God is central in healing among Christians. As a Christian, I could not agree more with the authors. Among the Christian community, it is a norm to state that “God willing, or by his Grace”, coinages that represent our faith in the power of God to make all things possible. Second, I find the piece interesting because of its similarity with emerging trend in Nigeria. The proliferation of Pentec

Today I had another interview with one of the volunteers for our project. Something she mentioned to me in our conversation was that she is a private individual. She has no family who live in the area. It’s just her boyfriend and her. She admitted that they have no friends really… no one they share experiences with, commiserate with, and celebrate milestones with. I asked her what encouraged her desire to be private. Pride. She and her boyfriend do not want to make widely known their tough circumstances. She doesn’t want others to feel like she is relying on them for anything that, perhaps, they are also struggling to maintain. While the strong sense of pride is unique among the three interviews I’ve been involved with so far, the lack of a network is not. My interview with this woman took place shortly after I had read the article on breastfeeding. In this article, Cripe discusses the difference in privileged, educated women/mothers and low-income mothers. She offers a quote from US

In considering the “alternative ways of healing and knowing” theme for class this week, as well as the accompanying readings, I was encouraged to push beyond my own traditional conceptualizations of “appropriate” medical care to acknowledge the ways in which complementary, alternative, and oriental medicine can be equally, if not more, beneficial. I felt myself constantly questioning if the potential benefits of fully adopting an integrative approach to medicine could outweigh the potential problems (or perhaps better framed as “additional work”) that such adoption would present. As I read the report commissioned by the IOM summit, I couldn’t help be surprised at the many ways an integrative medicine approach could be used to aid our ailing health system. For instance, a guiding principle of CAM rests in the idea that interventions that are natural and less invasive should be used whenever possible. Drawing from a prior post of mine regarding the problems of overtreatment in the medica

Tonight in our "Culture and Health" class, we discussed the meaning of humility in the lives of scholars, about how without humility, we become the "frog in the well" who defines her/his lifeworld from the boundaries of the well. To this frog in the well, the well is the best place in the world because it offers democracy, freedom, liberty, modern medicine, scientific progress and everything Western. Also, to the frog in the well, other cultures are unenlightened and need to be saved. That the frog itself might be in need for enlightenment does not ever cross the frog because she/he is content with the messages of cultural chauvinism that have been fed to her/him since childhood. That other cultures and ways of knowing have something valuable to offer, that "others" whom we have been trained to construct as primitive have invaluable life lessons and knowledge to educate us, that our so called civilized practices might be most fundamentally uncivilized: t

A lot of patients choose holistic medicine have been surveyed about why they chose holistic therapies said that they did so for spiritual reasons: They( Holistic doctors) had experienced events in their own lives that shifted them toward a holistic worldview in which the disparate pieces of reality seemed to fit together. This description in Zoller and Dutta (2008) reminds me of the understanding of traditional Chinese medicine. All the achieved doctors are senior aged. If patients entered a traditional Chinese medicine clinic, they expect someone who is the age of grandfather that rich of experience of medicine and life. Suppose there is a 30 years old doctor, patients will doubted inside previous anything he might say. Quite opposite, patients are more likely to accept some younger biomedicine physicians. They are supposed to be trained by the modern medical school and know more updated technology and method. Should we say that patients go to the holistic clinic for the communication