Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

As we wrap up our discussions of the culture-centered approach, I am drawn to the question of the role of dominant social institutions (academia, funding agencies, global agencies, NGOs) as tools for neoliberal trade. The other day, I found myself in the midst of this meeting where the people assembled were talking about how there is a lot of funding now for doing things related to poverty and inequality. What struck me was the dishonesty of the conversation. Poverty now has become a hot topic area that could draw a lot of funding. So the same people who were running after these other things when the wind was blowing in another direction are now running after poverty because this is fundable. What I find problematic here is not that academics/agencies etc. have now become interested in issues of poverty (in fact, this could be a great thing), but rather what is disconcerting to me is the mercenary logic underlying the renewed emphasis on poverty. And what lies this mercenary logic is ...

No I am not going to shut up And pretend That I agree with Whatever it is That you Shove down my throat. No I am not going to shut up And sing praise to your cross and white coat and Whatever it is That you Want me to memorize. No I am not going to shut up And sing Praises for Whatever it is That you Throw at me as aid.

Today is our last class of the semester. Last readings of the semester. What stands out? What would be the meta analysis of what I have learned here? What would be the key ideas that have come up on Culture and Health? Based on all of our reading from the semester, and the discussions, I feel these are the things that stand out to me: I know nothing. So much more to learn and know and apply. Articulating questions, concerns, and opinions can be tough when the materials are so interesting. Is everything hegemonic in nature? Is everything Eurocentric in its core? What are the legitimacy of efforts that are good at heart but are wrong on the approach? How can I really make a difference that is beyond discursive space and entry points? Let the journey begin. Purdue should make everyone take a class like this one.

they told me to participate & took my thumbprint while I clutched at the soggy food packet & scuttled to my field my baby wailing its a lot hotter now the fields are wilting like my aged mother Her partner.... My father speaks of glorious days of yore.. and I wonder shouldn't our dreams be glorious too? My baby's father.. strong and wise but he too gets scared with these men and women from town shiny white skins  fancy clothes, talks, ways why do they come here? our good doctor is scared too.. even the school master they come more now, regularly I store some food for them give them local things after all government has posted them for my baby I do not mind the hardships only they're increasing how much can I do? and then these visitors almost everyday.. interested in us our lives are so interesting they're good people they talk of dreams of glorious futures unlike my father.. It was better when I was a child my needs were few I knew little & did not have to ...

Just to let you "green eyed monsters" know that I will be posting my BLOG soon...wait....

This week's reading theme was Culture and Prevention. The overarching theme was how different factors (culture being one) play a role in preventive measures and perhaps cures to illnesses in today's world. Susser & Stein (2000) talks about how culture plays a role in the sexuality and sexual relations in the women of Southern Africa, specifically in situations of preventing HIV/AIDS. The authors conducted a study in different location of Southern Africa and tried to find out factors effecting women's sexual practices and birth control methods that are accepted by both men and women of that region. The authors mentioned many times how all their subjects were excited about using female condoms and almost in unison they said this is what they need. They say that "with regard to women at least, each community needs to be studied in terms of the local situation, and the preventive measures advised and facilitated for residents must take account of the differences betwee...

Parts of the readings for this week dealt with the development of effective health messages. Kreuter and colleagues talked about the effectiveness of health communication and ways to improve its quality. They introduce a model of health communication planning that considers the source, the message, the channel factors, the receiver, and the destination of a message in respect to communication and how these components might be affected by culture. The article highlights that source credibility depends on expertise and trustworthiness. As much as I agree with that, I do think we need to differentiate here, because expertise can be different things to different people. For me, growing up in a biomedical world, expertise is defined differently than for someone who grew up around traditional healers. It was also interesting to read how messages are perceived differently depending who narrates them, showing cleary that receivers of messages try to identify themselves with the narrator, hence...

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...