Keywords:
Health, Disease, Care, Inequalities, Anthropologies
Abstract:
Worldwide, epidemiological and socio-health scenarios are crossed by the persistence of deep inequalities. If, in the Global North, inequalities are becoming more and more ostensible, in the Global South, there is a deepening of the precariousness of life that shapes disease-health-care processes transversally. In this sense, the COVID-19 pandemic, as a global and simultaneous event, sharpened and highlighted tensions between global processes and local/regional responses and realities.
In this context, different perspectives and epistemologies of health, in constant tension, struggle to occupy socio-health spaces where hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices coexist, unfold, and overlap. Various anthropological perspectives have addressed these tensions, paying attention to heterogeneous local/regional configurations in relation to local history (with emphasis on colonialism and its consequences) and regional and global health policies, thus exploring the complexities involved in these processes.
In this framework, taking health-disease-care processes as a starting point has allowed us to deepen the understanding of contemporary global, regional, and local practices of socio-health governance, through a myriad of pre-institutional/institutional/post-institutional dynamics and logics where health policies and their relation to with multiple forms of inequity are intercepted, articulated and tensioned. Together with this, researchers have explored how these realities cross and constitute the lives of subjects and social groups, addressing collective and individual responses to suffering, discomfort, and disease, including the diversity of strategies of care, support, and protection developed to face, resist and/or transform conditions of vulnerability and social exclusion. This work has thrown light on how individual and collective strategies developed to survive, inhabit, (re)inhabit, and care for oneself and others emerge in contexts marked by profound inequalities regarding access to care and fragmented socio-sanitary systems.
These perspectives, anchored in local processes and concrete empirical problems, allow us to address a broader set of economic, political, technical, symbolic, and social issues that encompass and are expressed through health-disease-care processes involving national and plurinational states, as well as populations, governmental and non-governmental actors, global policies and agencies and local institutions, health professionals and advocacy groups, and non-hegemonic minority collectives.
This panel aims to create a space for mutual exchange and reflection for researchers linked to the fields of health or medical anthropology around the following topics:
a. Hegemonic and counter-hegemonic relations in global-regional-local socio-health networks and north-south relations.
b. Public policies, programs, institutions, and devices of medical attention, prevention, and care.
c. Processes involving vulnerability and social suffering regarding health or socio-sanitary issues: individual and collective responses.
d. The experience of illness, local attention networks, care, and self-care.
e. Health, illness-disease, care, and self-care processes in non-hegemonic minorities.
f. Embodiment, subjectivities, biotechnologies, and intersectionalities.
