When Culture Impacts Health

Bringing the hard-to-quantify aspects of lived experience to analysis, and emphasizing what might be lost in interventions if cultural insights are absent, this book includes case studies from across the Asia and Pacific regions -Bangladesh, Malaysia, New Guinea, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Tuvalu and the Cook Islands. When Culture Impacts Health offers conceptual, methodological and practical insights into understanding and successfully mediating cultural influences to address old and new public health issues including safe water delivery, leprosy, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and body image. It contains useful methodological tools - how to map cultural consensus, measure wealth capital, conduct a cultural economy audit, for example. It provides approaches for discerning between ethnic and racial constructs and for conducting research among indigenous peoples. The book will be indispensible for culture and health researchers in all regions.

1. When culture impacts health

Part A - Research approaches

2. The antecendents to culture in health research: perspectives from the social sciences

3. Biological and biocultural anthropology

4. Toward Cultural Epidemiology: Beyond Epistemological Hegemony

5. The cultural anthropological contribution to communicable disease epidemiology

Part B - Local tales

I. Industrial and post-industrial societies

6. Medicalisation or medicine as culture? : The case of ADHD

7. Filthy fingernails and friendly germs: Lay concepts of contagious disease transmission in developed countries

8. Context and environment: The value of considering lay epidemiology

9. Identity, social position, wellbeing and health: insights from Australians living with hearing loss

10. Framing debates about risk for skin cancer and vitamin D deficiency in New Zealand: Ethnicity, skin colour and / or cultural practice?

11. Analysing smoking using Te Whare Tapa Wha

12. Thirty years of New Zealand smoking advances a case for cultural epidemiology and cultural geography

13. On Slimming Pills, Growth Hormones, and Plastic Surgery: The Socioeconomic Value of the Body in South Korea

II. Economically transitioning societies

14. Tacking between disciplines Approaches to tuberculosis in New Zealand, Cook Islands and Tuvalu

15. Social determinants of health in a Papuan village

16. Life and well-being under historical ecological variation: the epidemiology of disease and of representations

17. Perceptions of Leprosy in the Orang Asli (indigenous minority) of Peninsular Malaysia

18. A qualitative exploration of factors affection uptake of water treatment technology in rural Bangladesh

19. Anthropological approaches to outbreak investigations in Bangladesh

20. Post-Disaster Coping in Aceh: Sociocultural Factors and Emotional Response

Part C - Methodological Lessons

21. Non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians: cultural-social positioning and health

22. Capturing the capitals; a heuristic for measuring â?~wealthâ?T of NZ children in the 21st century. An application to the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal cohort

23. Cultural consensus modeling of disease

24. Meaning and measurement - research with African immigrants in Australia

25. The cultural economy approach to studying chronic disease risks, with application to illicit drug use

26. Doing health policy research: how to interview policy elites

27. Thai food culture in transition: a mixed methods study on the role of food retailing

28. Developing culturally appropriate interventions to prevent person-to person transmission of Nipah Virus in Bangladesh: cultural epidemiology in action

Conclusion

29. From local tales to global lessons

30. Complementary readings