1st Edition

The Healthy Ancestor Embodied Inequality and the Revitalization of Native Hawai’ian Health

By Juliet McMullin Copyright 2009
    200 Pages
    by Routledge

    202 Pages
    by Routledge

    Native Americans, researchers increasingly worry, are disproportionately victims of epidemics and poor health because they “fail” to seek medical care, are “non-compliant” patients, or “lack immunity” enjoyed by the “mainstream” population. Challenging this dominant approach to indigenous health, Juliet McMullin shows how it masks more fundamental inequalities that become literally embodied in Native Americans, shifting blame from unequal social relations to biology, individual behavior, and cultural or personal deficiencies. Weaving a complex story of Native Hawai’ian health in its historical, political, and cultural context, she shows how traditional practices that integrated relationships of caring for the land, the body, and the ancestors are being revitalized both on the islands and in the indigenous diaspora. For the fields of medical anthropology, public health, nursing, epidemiology, and indigenous studies, McMullin’s important book offers models for more effective and culturally appropriate approaches to building healthy communities.

    Introduction 1. Hawaiian Health: A Casualty of History 2. Managing Identity, Context and Methods 3. Complicating Health Seeking Practices 4. Variations in Definitions of Health 5. Remembering Ancestors: Food and Land 6. Constituting the Hawaiian Body: Resisting and Reinterpreting Health and Control Conclusion References

    Biography

    Juliet Marie McMullin is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California Riverside.