Healing at the Periphery

2022 ◽  

India has long occupied an important place in Tibetan medicine's history and development. However, Indian Himalayan practitioners of Tibetan medicine, or amchi, have largely remained overlooked at the Tibetan medical periphery, despite playing a central social and medical role in their communities. Power and legitimacy, religion and economic development, biomedical encounters and Indian geopolitics all intersect in the work and identities of contemporary Himalayan amchi. This volume examines the crucial moment of crisis and transformation that occurred in the early 2000s to offer insights into the beginnings of Tibetan medicine's professionalization, industrialization, and official recognition in India and elsewhere. Based on fine-grained ethnographic studies in Ladakh, Zangskar, Sikkim, and the Darjeeling Hills, Healing at the Periphery asks how the dynamics of capitalism, social change, and the encounter with biomedicine affect small communities on the fringes of modern India, and, conversely, what local transformations of Tibetan medicine tell us about contemporary society and health care in the Himalayas and the Tibetan world. Contributors. Florian Besch, Calum Blaikie, Sienna R. Craig, Barbara Gerke, Isabelle Guérin, Kim Gutschow, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Stephan Kloos, Fernanda Pirie, Laurent Pordié

Author(s):  
Ivan V. Small

Abstract Remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora have played an important role in Vietnam's post-Cold War economic development, providing important inputs to a range of household spending areas, from education to health care. In the case of Vietnam, however, remittances are also caught up with memories and traumas of war, betrayal, separation, and exodus. This article traces that history and illustrates how Vietnam's particular post-war refugee and remittance situations and channels illuminate networks and exacerbate inherent contradictions and comparisons in the mobile flows of finance, people, and goods across borders. Examining genealogies of remittance reception and management offers insight and intervention into analytical assumptions of the distancing and mediating functions inherent to classic conceptions of money, as well as the reciprocity and recognition perceptions mapped onto gift economies.


Sexual Health ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Hengel ◽  
Rebecca Guy ◽  
Linda Garton ◽  
James Ward ◽  
Alice Rumbold ◽  
...  

Background Remote Australian Aboriginal communities experience high rates of bacterial sexually transmissible infections (STI). A key strategy to reduce STIs is to increase testing in primary health care centres. The current study aimed to explore barriers to offering and conducting STI testing in this setting. Methods: A qualitative study was undertaken as part of the STI in Remote communities, Improved and Enhanced Primary Health Care (STRIVE) project; a large cluster randomised controlled trial of a sexual health quality improvement program. We conducted 36 in-depth interviews in 22 participating health centres across four regions in northern and central Australia. Results: Participants identified barriers including Aboriginal cultural norms that require the separation of genders and traditional kinship systems that prevent some staff and patients from interacting, both of which were exacerbated by a lack of male staff. Other common barriers were concerns about client confidentiality (lack of private consulting space and living in small communities), staff capacity to offer testing impacted by the competing demands for staff time, and high staff turnover resulting in poor understanding of clinic systems. Many participants also expressed concerns about managing positive test results. To address some of these barriers, participants revealed informal strategies, such as team work, testing outside the clinic and using adult health checks. Conclusions: Results identify cultural, structural and health system issues as barriers to offering STI testing in remote communities, some of which were overcome through the creativity and enthusiasm of individuals rather than formal systems. Many of these barriers can be readily addressed through strengthening existing systems of cultural and clinical orientation and educating staff to view STI in a population health framework. However others, particularly issues in relation to culture, kinship ties and living in small communities, may require testing modalities that do not rely on direct contact with health staff or the clinic environment.


2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Goldberg ◽  
Neal Rosenburg ◽  
Jean Watson

Although health care institutions continue to address the importance of diversity initiatives, the standard(s) for treatment remain historically and institutionally grounded in a sociocultural privileging of heterosexuality. As a result, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities in health care remain largely invisible. This marked invisibility serves as a call to action, a renaissance of thinking within redefined boundaries and limitations. We must therefore refocus our habits of attention on the wholeness of persons and the diversity of their storied experiences as embodied through contemporary society. By rethinking current understandings of LGBTQ+ identities through innovative representation(s) of the media, music industry, and pop culture within a caring science philosophy, nurses have a transformative opportunity to render LGBTQ+ visible and in turn render a transformative opportunity for themselves.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Frickel ◽  
Rebekah Torcasso ◽  
Annika Anderson

The organization of expert activism is a problem of increasing importance for social movement organizers and scholars alike. Yet the relative invisibility of expert activists within social movements makes them difficult to systematically identify and study. This article offers two related ways forward. First, we advance a theory of “shadow mobilization” to explain the organization of expert activism in the broader context of proliferating risk and intensifying knowledge-based conflict. Second, we introduce a new methodological approach for collecting systematic data on members of this difficult-to-reach population. Findings from comparative analysis of expert activists in the environmental justice movement in Louisiana and the alternative agriculture movement in Washington reveal both important commonalities and fine-grained differences, suggesting that shadow mobilizations are strategic collective responses to cumulative risk in contemporary society.


Author(s):  
Inna Tiutiunyk ◽  
Julia Belous

Trends in the development of the main components of financial and economic security of the country indicate their significant variability and dependence on a combination of internal and external factors. An important place among the drivers of influence on the level of financial and economic security is occupied by tax revenues. Given the prolonged national and transnational market turbulence, which is observed in most sectors of the economy, one of the biggest threats to the financial and economic security of most countries is the presence of a significant volume of shadow operations. The consequences of their implementation are the lack of tax revenues in the budget and the reduction of the country's financial viability in financing economic development programs. The purpose of the article is to study the impact of tax gaps on the level of financial and economic security of the country. In the paper, the essence of the financial and economic security of the country, which is proposed to be understood as a complex concept, integrates the features of economic and financial development of the economic system. Based on the systematization of scientific literatures, the main tasks and functions of financial and economic security of the country including realization of goals and objectives of financial policy and formation of favorable conditions for economically sustainable development and growth, highlights the characteristics of this concept are substantiated. The paper identifies three characteristic features of the financial and economic security of the country: as an indicator of its ability to protect the interests of society in a volatile external and internal environment; economically sustainable development and growth; leveling threats to the internal and external environment. The role of tax gaps in reducing the level of financial and economic security of the country is substantiated, the probability of formation of tax gaps in the economy is predicted, measures to minimize tax evasion as components of increasing its financial and economic security are proposed. The established interdependencies should serve as a basis for the transformation of state economic and financial policy in Ukraine in terms of minimizing the negative impact of the shadow sector of the economy on the indicators of economic development of the state.


Author(s):  
M. V. Dorokhov

The article provides an analytical assessment of the impact of human capital on the pace of economic development of the state. Human capital acts as a key production and social factor in the development of the economy. The main factors contributing to the development of human capital are identified: health care and education, culture and sports, social security.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-120
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Vetrova ◽  
Daria Vasianina ◽  
Ivan Mityushnikov

The state of the health care system is an important characteristic of the country’s social and economic development, but the results of surveys can not demonstrate an objective result. The respondents are influenced by a number of factors, including their level of socialization, in assessing healthcare services. In the article, we consider the hypothesis that communication with relatives and neighborhood significantly increases the relative pessimism of the subjective evaluation of healthcare services by the elderly. In order to reduce the incompatibility of subjective assessments of respondents, the anchoring vignette method is used.


2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 141-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald T. Keusch

Increasingly, health is recognized as a major force for economic development; and because economic development is central to political and social stability, health is being looked at as the great hope for the future of the world, as population sizes and disparities among them increase. This perspective has been growing ever since the 1993 World Development Report was released by the World Bank, and it has fueled an intensive scrutiny of health care around the world, focusing on systems and health care delivery on the one hand, and equitable access to the products of research on the other hand. In the middle of all of is this is a concern about how health care (which must include both the training of personnel from the basic low level health care worker to the physician), and research and development (which must include the financing of research in academia and the development of products primarily in the private sector) are organized, and how they do or do not address inequities between and within populations and nations.


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