scholarly journals Talking drums and ethical conundrums

1970 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Health Knowledge ◽  
Female Circumcision ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
International Aid ◽  
The Body ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Power Point

Malian women and children represent the poorest as well as the most difficult to reach through written media. The interrelated practices of dancing, drumming, and storytelling transmit history, cultural beliefs, and current events for people who do not read and write. Researchers in the social sciences and officials for international aid organizations struggle with the circulation and reception of public health literature. They now recognize that native non-governmental organizations with staff that are fluent not only in the native languages but also in the social mores, better communicate with under-served populations through means other than billboards, pamphlets, or power-point presentations. The body, in both a general Western and Malian tradition, plays a particular role in how we come to know the world. This paper describes research conducted in Mali on female circumcision with international aid organizations, native NGOs, and independent human rights activists. Three interconnected areas form a triangular framework: how different research methods like dancing, drumming, storytelling, and soccer can offer valuable phenomenological insights to lived experience; the ethics of learning and listening to these various voices that transmit sexual health knowledge; and the ethics of engaging and disseminating such knowledge. The talking drums elicit new ways of seeing, being, and listening along with ethical ethnographic conundrums.

scholarly journals A Correlational Analysis of Social Factors with Obesity among Malay Obese People

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4.34) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Saif Ullah ◽  
Norizan Abdul Ghani ◽  
Atif Ameen Baig
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Health Knowledge ◽  
Eating Habits ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
Body Image Dissatisfaction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Obese Adults ◽  
Obese People ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
The Social

This study examines the correlation between social factors and obesity among Malay obese people (age: 20-59 years old) in Terengganu, Malaysia. Comprised of cross-sectional research design, this study has been applied a convenience sampling technique. Clinical Practice Guidelines on Management of Obesity (2004) criteria was adopted < 27.49kg/m2 to measure the body mass index. The number of participants were included in this study n = 150 (male = 80 & females = 70). Data is collected by using close-ended self-administrated questionnaire. SPSS version 21.0 was used for the data analysis. The results reveals that obesity is significantly correlated with feelings (low self-esteem), body image dissatisfaction, eating and dieting frequency (eating habits), frequency of exercise (physical inactivity), physical activity barriers, and media influence. Moreover, obesity has found insignificant with health knowledge, religious knowledge, religious practices and their relation with obesity. It is a pioneer study that has assessed the correlation of social factors and obesity among Malay obese adults in Terengganu, Malaysia. This study reports that majority of the social factors are significantly correlated with obesity. Therefore, interventional programs should be arranged by government based on the social factors in order to decrease the level of obesity in Terengganu, Malaysia.  

scholarly journals The socio-cultural-symbolic nexus in the perpetuation of female genital cutting: a critical review of existing discourses

Afrika Focus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Tammary Esho ◽  
Steven Van Wolputte ◽  
Paul Enzlin
Keyword(s):  
Female Circumcision ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Female Genital Cutting ◽  
Unintended Effects ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Genital Cutting ◽  
Female Genital

Female Genital Cutting (FGC), also known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Female Circumcision (FC), continues to be a prevalent practice in many parts of the world and especially in Africa. This is somewhat perplexing given the concerted efforts aimed at eradicating this practice. This article argues that the perperuation of FGC is due to the unintended effects of marginalization experienced by individuals and groups of women as a result of the approach of some of the anti-FGC global discourses and policies put forward to eradicate the practice. This, we argue, happens when the social structure that provides such groups and individuals with a sense of identity and belonging breaks down. Therefore, the attack on what practicing communities consider to be of crucial cultural value causes a re-focus on the practice resulting in a re-formulation and re-invention of these practices in a bid to counter the feelings of alienation. FGC is thus reframed and reconstructed as a reaction against these campaigns. This article intends to investigate the socio-cultural-symbolic nexus surrounding the practice of FGC, its meaning and implications with respect to its continued existence. It draws examples mainly from communities in Kenya that practice FGM as a rite of passage into adulthood. Herein, perhaps, lies the driving force behind the practice in this contemporary age: it carries a lot of significance with respect to transformational processes, and it is seen as crucial in the representation of the body, identity and belonging. The aim of this article is not to defend FGC’s continuation, but rather to explore the interplay between its changing socio-cultural dimensions as a counter-reaction to the eradication discourse and policies. In this way we will try to explore some of the factors that lay behind its perpetuation.

Toward an Affective Political Ecology of Obesity

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-366
Author(s):  
Emma-Jayne Abbots ◽  
Karin Eli ◽  
Stanley Ulijaszek
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Ecologies ◽  
Political Economic

This article argues for an affective approach to obesity that destabilizes the conceptual boundaries between the biological and the social aspects of food, eating, and fatness. Its approach foregrounds visceral experience, attends to food both inside and outside the body, and explores how bodies labeled “obese” consume their political, economic, and material environments. This approach is termed affective political ecology. The authors’ aim is to draw attention to how the entanglements between the physiological and social aspects of eating tend to be absented from antiobesity public health rhetoric. By exploring a range of ethnographic examples in high-income countries, they illuminate how such interventions often fail to account for the complex interplays between subjective corporeal experience and political economic relations and contend that overlooking an individual’s visceral relationship with food counterproductively augments social stigma, stresses, and painful emotions. They demonstrate, then, how an approach that draws together political economic and biomedical perspectives better reflects the lived experience of eating. In so doing, the authors aim to indicate how attending to affective political ecologies can further our understanding of the consumption practices of those in precarious and stressful social contexts, and they offer additional insight into how the entanglement of the biological and the social is experienced in everyday life.

scholarly journals Annie Ernaux et Édouard Louis : Écrire le réel entre bruit(s) et silence

Cahiers ERTA ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 35-57
Author(s):  
Delphine Edy
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Annie Ernaux ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bear Witness

A. Ernaux and É. Louis – writers of the real, between silence and noise In A. Ernaux’s steps, É. Louis writes to account for truth, to bear witness for the real. They experience sounds, noises and silences as particularly meaningful signs of the social classes that they live in. Their original, popular environment is made of constant noise, whether coming from inside the body or the surrounding working-place. Later as they rise socially, they realise that more privileged classes live in a filtered, muffled world. But being loud may also be a move toward freedom, an expression of the lived experience. The theatre stage is a particularly apt media for the telling of É. Louis’s stories as it enables the varied experiences to be heard and felt through their vibrations, and all noises on stage make sense.

scholarly journals The socio-cultural-symbolic nexus in the perpetuation of female genital cutting: a critical review of existing discourses

Afrika Focus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammary Esho ◽  
Steven Van Wolputte ◽  
Paul Enzlin
Keyword(s):  
Female Circumcision ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Female Genital Cutting ◽  
Unintended Effects ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Genital Cutting ◽  
Female Genital

Female Genital Cutting (FGC), also known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Female Circumcision (FC), continues to be a prevalent practice in many parts of the world and especially in Africa. This is somewhat perplexing given the concerted efforts aimed at eradicating this practice. This article argues that the perpetuation of FGC is due to the unintended effects of marginalization experienced by individuals and groups of women as a result of the approach of some of the anti-FGC global discourses and policies put forward to eradicate the practice. This, we argue, happens when the social structure that provides such groups and individuals with a sense of identity and belonging breaks down. Therefore, the attack on what practicing communities consider to be of crucial cultural value causes a re-focus on the practice resulting in a re-formulation and re-invention of these practices in a bid to counter the feelings of alienation. FGC is thus reframed and reconstructed as a reaction against these campaigns. This article intends to investigate the socio-cultural-symbolic nexus surrounding the practice of FGC, its meaning and implications with respect to its continued existence. It draws examples mainly from communities in Kenya that practice FGM as a rite of passage into adulthood. Herein, perhaps, lies the driving force behind the practice in this contemporary age: it carries a lot of significance with respect to transformational processes, and it is seen as crucial in the representation of the body, identity and belonging. The aim of this article is not to defend FGC’s continuation, but rather to explore the interplay between its changing socio-cultural dimensions as a counter-reaction to the eradication discourse and policies. In this way we will try to explore some of the factors that lay behind its perpetuation. Key words: body practices, female genital cutting, female circumcision, femininity, cultural identity 

Language and Embodied Sexuality

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian W. King
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Use ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Agency ◽  
Language And Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Features ◽  
The Relationship

Embodiment has long been of interest to scholars of language in society, and yet theoretical discussions of the inseparability of language and the body have been paradoxically minimal until quite recently. Focusing on the processes by which sexualized bodies are understood, this chapter examines two research case studies—intersex bodies and male bodies—to outline the ways that language and sexuality scholarship can contribute to knowledge of the confluence of the social and the soma during social interaction. Bodies are both subjective and social: in one sense we have subjective, embodied knowledge of what it means to live in our sexualized bodies and “speak from” them as part of lived experience, and in another sense our bodies are also observed from outside and “spoken about” as sexual. The analysis presented here explores the relationship between physical features of bodies, discourse, language, and power, and links these insights to notions of confluence, demonstrating that bodies can be unruly, obtrusive, overdetermined, and excessive. The chapter considers the implications of this analysis for language use, intelligibility, and sexual agency.

scholarly journals Population Aging as the Social Body in Representation and Real Life

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Crampton
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Population Aging ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social

This article uses three levels of body analysis as presented by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock to compare old age as a construct in population aging discourse with research on lived experience of people aging in the United States and Ghana. I first describe how demographers construct social bodies as becoming “gray” through population statistics and how policy makers then use dependency ratios to rationalize intervention on behalf of older adults in the body-politic.  The construction of old age within this discourse is then compared with ethnographic research that suggests this construct leaves out much of the lived experience familiar to anthropologists of aging.  Rather than debunk the old age construct, however, the purpose of this article is to argue for study of population aging discourse as constituting a social body reflecting cultural constructions of nature and society.  Moreover, this representation is made real through policy and social intervention work, and with very real effect on people’s lives. As such, an anthropology of aging bodies can include the social life of old age as a social construct.

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

Engaging Student Mothers Creatively: Animated Stories of Navigating University, Inner City, and Home Worlds

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-114
Author(s):  
Lise Kouri ◽  
Tania Guertin ◽  
Angel Shingoose
Keyword(s):  
Inner City ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
Student Mothers ◽  
Education Outcomes ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The University ◽  
Animated Graphic

The article discusses a collaborative project undertaken in Saskatoon by Community Engagement and Outreach office at the University of Saskatchewan in partnership with undergraduate student mothers with lived experience of poverty. The results of the project were presented as an animated graphic narrative that seeks to make space for an under-represented student subpopulation, tracing strategies of survival among university, inner city and home worlds. The innovative animation format is intended to share with all citizens how community supports can be used to claim fairer health and education outcomes within system forces at play in society. This article discusses the project process, including the background stories of the students. The entire project, based at the University of Saskatchewan, Community Engagement and Outreach office at Station 20 West, in Saskatoon’s inner city, explores complex intersections of racialization, poverty and gender for the purpose of cultivating empathy and deeper understanding within the university to better support inner city students. amplifying community voices and emphasizing the social determinants of health in Saskatoon through animated stories.

A body without a head

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Chavoshian ◽  
Sophia Park
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Passive Condition ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Logical Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Body Shapes ◽  
Body Theory

Along with the recent development of various theories of the body, Lacan’s body theory aligns with postmodern thinkers such as Michael Foucault and Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who consider body social not biological. Lacan emphasizes the body of the Real, the passive condition of the body in terms of formation, identity, and understanding. Then, this condition of body shapes further in the condition of bodies of women and laborers under patriarchy and capitalism, respectively. Lacan’s ‘not all’ position, which comes from the logical square, allows women to question patriarchy’s system and alternatives of sexual identities. Lacan’s approach to feminine sexuality can be applied to women’s spirituality, emphasizing multiple narratives of body and sexual identities, including gender roles. In the social discernment and analysis in the liberation theology, we can employ the capitalist discourse, which provides a tool to understand how people are manipulated by late capitalist society, not knowing it. Lacan’s theory of ‘a body without a head’ reflects the current condition of the human body, which manifests lack, yet including some possibilities for transforming society.

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