Tag: health

The Hidden Dimensions of Human–Wildlife Conflict: Health Impacts, Opportunity and Transaction Costs

By Maan Barua, Shonil A. Bhagwat, and Sushrut Jadhav 

The impact of conservation policies on human wellbeing is critical to the integration of poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation. In many low-income countries, human–wildlife conflict adversely affects wellbeing of communities that closely interface with wildlife. Approaches to framing and mitigating conflict emphasize its visible costs. Hidden impacts, i.e. costs that are uncompensated, temporally delayed, or psychosocial in nature, remain poorly addressed. This paper examines the hidden impacts of human–wildlife conflict in low-income countries. It presents an account of the known and potential hidden impacts, investigating their effects on rural communities. Hidden impacts of human–wildlife conflict include diminished psychosocial wellbeing, disruption of livelihoods and food insecurity. Considerable opportunity costs are incurred through crop and livestock guarding. When seeking compensation for damage, bureaucratic inadequacies result in added transaction costs. Even though communities may be tolerant of wildlife, the hidden impacts of conflict jeopardize various components of global wellbeing. The paper concludes by identifying gaps in knowledge and outlining areas for future research that better address hidden dimensions of human–wildlife conflict.

Read the article here.

Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India

By Cecilia Coale Van Hollen

As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen’s critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women’s narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.

Read the book here.

Virtually Virgins: Sexual Strategies and Cervical Cancer in Recife, Brazil

By Jessica L. Gregg

This book provides a detailed, intimate portrait of a community of women living in a shantytown (favela) in northeastern Brazil, while exploring the complex interplay between gender, sexuality, power, and disease. It reveals how poor Brasileiras are constrained by dominant cultural constructions of female sexuality as a dangerous force that must be controlled by men; yet these women also manipulate these expectations by using their sexuality as a means to secure economic support from men. The book argues that these constructions affect their interpretations of medical discourse on the prevention of cervical cancer. Since women view sex as both a force they can’t control and as a necessary tool for their survival, they choose to de-emphasize medical warnings against risky sexual behavior, with grave consequences for their health. The text is threaded with poignant, humorous, sometimes graphic, and always memorable depictions of the women’s lives in the shantytowns, making this serious anthropological study a highly readable one as well.

Read this book here.

Dhis and Dhāt: Evidence of Semen Retention Syndrome Amongst White Britons

By Sushrut Jadhav

The uncritical application of western psychiatric concepts in non-western societies resulting in culturally invalid psychiatric syndromes, have been extensively documented. Such instances are considered ‘category errors’. In contrast, ‘reverse category errors’ although theoretically postulated, have never been empirically demonstrated. Diagnostic criteria of an established South Asian culture specific neurosis, Dhāt syndrome, were deployed by a psychiatrist of South Asian origin, amongst 47 white Britons in London, UK, presenting for the first time with a clinic diagnosis of ICD-9 Depressive Neurosis (Dysthymic Disroder, ICD-11). The proceedure yielded a new disorder, Semen Retention Syndrome. Based on narrative accounts and quantitative scores on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, the evidence suggests that a significant subset of white British subjects diagnosed with Dysthymic Disorder, may in fact be expressing a psychological variation of a previously unknown local White British somatisation phenomena labelled Semen Retention Syndrome. Anxiety and depressive symptoms presented by this subset of subjects were primarily attributed to a core irrational belief and a cognitive error centered around misunderstood concepts of semen physiology. Consequently, the undue focus on mood idioms by both white British patients and their health professionals, leads to a mistaken diagnosis of Mood Disorder, and results in incorrect treatment. The implications of this ethnocentric mode of reasoning raises concerns about existing concepts in psychiatric phenomenology and for official international diagnostic classificatory systems. The paper concludes by arguing that category errors in both directions are instances of cultural iatrogenesis, and underscore the importance of a culturally valid psychiatry.

Read the article here.

Yesterday (2004)

Written and directed by Darrell Roodt

Yesterday is a 2004 South African drama film that tells the story of a young mother, Yesterday (Leleti Khumalo), who discovers she has AIDS. Her husband, a migrant mine labourer, rejected her despite being the one that infected her. Her ambition is to live long enough to see her daughter, Beauty, go to school.

This film is the first commercial feature-length production in Zulu. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 77th Academy Awards and won Best Sound and Best Editing at the inaugural  Africa Movie Academy Awards.

Watch the film here.

Pills That Swallow Policy: Clinical Ethnography of a Community Mental Health Program in Northern India

By Sumeet Jain and Sushrut Jadhav

India’s National Mental Health Program (NMHP) was initiated in 1982 with the objective of promoting community participation and accessible mental health services. A key component involves central government calculation and funding for psychotropic medication. Based on clinical ethnography of a community psychiatry program in north India, this article traces the biosocial journey of psychotropic pills from the centre to the periphery. As the pill journeys from the Ministry of Health to the clinic, its symbolic meaning transforms from an emphasis on accessibility and participation to the administration of a discrete ‘treatment’. Instead of embodying participation and access, the pill achieves the opposite: silencing community voices, re-enforcing existing barriers to care, and relying on pharmacological solutions for psychosocial problems. The symbolic inscription of NMHP policies on the pill fail because they are undercut by more powerful meanings generated from local cultural contexts. An understanding of this process is critical for the development of training and policy that can more effectively address local mental health concerns in rural India.

Read the article here.

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

By Mythheli Sreenivas

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonised some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe.

To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions-about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world.

Read the book here.

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