A Culture-Centered Exploration of Health: Constructions From Rural Bangladesh

Abstract

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.

Notes

¹All 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.

² Subalternity refers to the condition of being hidden or being erased from dominant discursive spaces of knowledge production.

³We engage dialogically with the participatory articulations of community members in one Bangladeshi rural community. Therefore, our engagement with the voices of local community members in this particular rural community is highly localized, attending to the specifics of the particular. However, as noted by Dutta-Bergman (2004a; 2004b), it is precisely in this engagement with the localized particular that we need to aggregate participant responses in order to interject mainstream policy discourses, thus moving toward strategically working with the localized voices in disrupting the silences in policy discourses, and creating entry points for social change in health-related policymaking as well as program planning.

⁴In cases where specific terms were used in Bangla language, they are used here inside quotation marks for the richness of understanding. “Abhab” is a term that is used in Bangla to refer to the consistent absence of resources from the poorer sectors of communities. The term emerges often in literary and popular cultures of rural Bengal to articulate a space where absences mark the everyday lived experiences of individuals and their families.