A Culture-Centered Exploration of Health: Constructions From Rural Bangladesh (original) (raw)

2012, Health Communication

The traditional approach in health communication has historically adopted a linear model to explore and study health, without considering the voices of the subaltern sectors in academic discourse. Such linear models prescribe one-way knowledge, information, and transmission of beliefs from the core health sectors to the subalterns at the margins. The culture-centered approach to health focuses on co-constructing meanings of health through dialogic engagement with communities that are situated at the margins of mainstream discursive spaces. This co-constructive research investigates how members of a Bangladeshi rural community define, construct, and negotiate health issues in their everyday lives through their narratives of health, illness, and healing. The findings explicate how the community participants negotiate their health in terms of poverty, work, and structure, and highlights how the participants negotiate their marginalization through communicative practices. The in-depth narratives on their construction of health underscore possible entry points into constructing culture-centered praxis, pointing toward spaces of change. Karimana 1 is a woman in her early thirties who lives in a remote village of Bangladesh. She and her husband have seven children. Karimana sometimes does part-time work here and there, and does not have any education at all. She wants to work more and contribute toward her family income and needs, but cannot find work. Money is extremely tight in her family and being sick is not an option for her or her seven children or her husband. She rarely goes to see a doctor, she says, and only does so when she is "really, really sick and can manage some money" for the doctor's fees. Her core belief about illness, perhaps because of her struggles and limitations in life, is that God gives illness and if HE wants to cure it, HE will, and otherwise there is nothing much one can do about it. Karimana is not alone in her situation in life, and there are many others like her in rural Bangladesh who articulate the meanings of health in the backdrop of poverty 1 All names used in this article have been changed to protect the respondents' identities, although, none of them had any objection about using their own names.