Hunger as Health: Culture-Centered Interrogations of Alternative Rationalities of Health

Abstract

What are the experiences of health at the margins of the globe? How do the material inequities in the distributions of resources across the globe play out in the expressions of the experiences of health in the localized contexts of the global margins? In this synthesis essay, I draw upon three interconnected ethnographies conducted over several villages in West Bengal, India, over a decade-long period to explore the alternative rationalities of health that emerge at the margins. At the heart of these ethnographies is the commitment to culturally center narratives of health as hunger, foregrounding the everyday experiences of hunger and the expressions of agency at the margins in securing access to food resources. Based on the synthesis of the ethnographies, entry points are suggested for the praxis of social change communication that builds on the articulation of health as hunger and imagines localized strategies of collective resistance.

Keywords:

• Culture-Centered Approach
• Hunger
• Critical Health Communication
• Voices
• Margins

Acknowledgments

The author would like to take this opportunity to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, Professor Kathy Miller, and Professor Barbara Sharf for their insights and feedback on this work, and would also like to thank the participants in this ethnographic work who have shared their stories in imagining a politics of change amidst neoliberal reforms that have swept across India.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohan Jyoti Dutta

Mohan J Dutta is Professor and Head of the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore