医学人类学 4 - Health 健康

Health: 

Health is a state of well-being.

It is shaped by social and environmental determinants, and its meaning is inflected by culture.

Well-being - what is good? Value judgement!

Health - discursive construction

How we understand health by discourse

What people say? What is healthy? Research about health

Our understanding of health is constructed through discourse.

Normativity

Value: a collective preference, including ideas of what is good, true, or beautiful

- important for group of people

Eg American value - human freedom (explicit) / aggressive (implicit)

Norm: standards of group behavior

Judgemental - enforcement

Healthism

Healthism as a discourse of health - moral values, judgement with normativity

Healthism is a practice that reinforces normativity.

Symbol

- Anything that represents another thing

- Sign: a signifier (word “desk”) and a signified (actual desk)

Denotation: the signifier has a literal or immediate relationship to the thing represented. (word “desk” denotes the actual desk.)

Connotation (broader, indirect): something implied, rather than denoted, by a signifier.

Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor”

Sontag argues against the use of illness as metaphor. The consequences of such Romantic thinking are that the ill person feels doomed—even feeling that he or she has in some mysterious way caused the sickness. This sense of fate works against the patient’s efforts to secure the best medical treatment. It even prevents doctors from being honest with the patients for fear that the dreaded word “cancer” will sap the patient’s desire to get well. Sontag argues vigorously against this tendency to succumb to fear and shame, urging her readers to take charge of their own medical care by aggressively seeking the best treatment.

Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

Stigma: a visible sign or characteristic of a disease.