Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The different narratives of a situation by the different people involved in it reminded me of a movie very close to my heart, Rashomon . As Connelly (2002) succintly puts it, the decision to retell a story will depend on the personal reasons/ motivations of the reteller. In today's world of health communication we have so many competing narratives. The search for the "real" or "right" narrative is not important but what's important is not to ignore these stories. Narratives provide us invaluable insights into a human beings life, suffering, existence, surrounding, health. In many ways it provides us a ground to move ahead, take decisions.  In emergency response, in the first 48 hours, usually teams do not find much records or information as most records are affected and the normal information channels are in a disarray and non functional. So, the way the response team moves ahead is by collecting narratives: "so please tell us how did the flood waters c...

This week's readings has many points to start a discussion. Many notable ones talk of pain as a human experience and situated in the body. Indeed, how do we manifest pain or is pain itself a manifestation? The health communication concern and the concern of the many health organizations in the US it to create constructs around it, quantify it, isolate it and advertise and sell treatment for it, the fancy "disorders" patented under exotic names. This is what Kleinman et.al., (1992) call the political economic transformation of pain and its treatment. I found myself wondering, of course we all agree that converting socio-somatic processes into biological terminology is reductionist but hasn't that been the enterprise of much of the positivist scholars and yet alive and kicking now in NSF funding criteria and erstwhile "Bush" science (St. Pierrie, 2006). My primary education being in Physics and Management, I am very amused to see all these scholars studying hu...