Theses defended
What can a science?: epidemiology, popular knowledges and ecosocial crisis in southern Chile
June 21, 2021
Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship
João Arriscado Nunes
e
Paul Hersch Martinez
Socio-cultural epidemiology is a theoretical-methodological approach that emerges from Latin American from a critique of conventional epidemiology, considered ineffective in articulating transformative social responses to persistent health injustices. Despite its interesting epistemological, conceptual and methodological developments, it is practically absent from the disciplinary field.
The objective of this research was to understand and accompany the knowledge practices of sociocultural epidemiology in the Chiloé archipelago, a group of 42 islands located in southern Chile. Through an ethnographic approach, an 11-month field work (2017-2018) was carried out where participant observation was made in its research-action-pedagogical spaces, semi-structured interviews with its main actors and analysis of their productions.
The socio-cultural epidemiology of Chiloé emerges during the first two decades of the 21st century among ecological, social, and health crises produced by a harmful mode of extractivism. It takes up the political principles of Latin American Social Medicine/Collective Health movement and combines them pragmatically with the theoretical-methodological proposals of culturalist medical anthropology. Their knowledge practices are based on the constitution of spaces for dialogue integrated by patients, therapists, health officials and community organizations where knowledges related to health-disease process are translated and articulated from diversity of life experiences and traditions (indigenous, popular and biomedical). Two of his "fundamental explanatory models" (balance/imbalance-transgression and autonomy/dependency) whose roots lie in the Mapuche worldview, appear critical to make intelligible their processes of ethico-onto-epistemological transformation, their projections and their limits.
Keywords: sociocultural epidemiology; health-disease process; extractivism; intercultural
translation; Chiloé archipelago
Public Defence date
Doctoral Programme
Supervision
Abstract
Socio-cultural epidemiology is a theoretical-methodological approach that emerges from Latin American from a critique of conventional epidemiology, considered ineffective in articulating transformative social responses to persistent health injustices. Despite its interesting epistemological, conceptual and methodological developments, it is practically absent from the disciplinary field.
The objective of this research was to understand and accompany the knowledge practices of sociocultural epidemiology in the Chiloé archipelago, a group of 42 islands located in southern Chile. Through an ethnographic approach, an 11-month field work (2017-2018) was carried out where participant observation was made in its research-action-pedagogical spaces, semi-structured interviews with its main actors and analysis of their productions.
The socio-cultural epidemiology of Chiloé emerges during the first two decades of the 21st century among ecological, social, and health crises produced by a harmful mode of extractivism. It takes up the political principles of Latin American Social Medicine/Collective Health movement and combines them pragmatically with the theoretical-methodological proposals of culturalist medical anthropology. Their knowledge practices are based on the constitution of spaces for dialogue integrated by patients, therapists, health officials and community organizations where knowledges related to health-disease process are translated and articulated from diversity of life experiences and traditions (indigenous, popular and biomedical). Two of his "fundamental explanatory models" (balance/imbalance-transgression and autonomy/dependency) whose roots lie in the Mapuche worldview, appear critical to make intelligible their processes of ethico-onto-epistemological transformation, their projections and their limits.
Keywords: sociocultural epidemiology; health-disease process; extractivism; intercultural
translation; Chiloé archipelago