{"title":"Waiting for Care and Community Organizing for Serious Health-Related Suffering in Kerala, India.","authors":"Devi Vijay, Gitte H Koksvik","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2351066","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We explore the temporalities that shape and alleviate serious health-related suffering among those with chronic and terminal conditions in Kerala, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2019, we examine the entanglements between waiting for care within dominant institutions and the community organizing that palliates this waiting. Specifically, people navigate multiple medical institutions, experience loneliness and abandonment, loss of autonomy, and delays and denials of recognition as they wait for care. Community palliative care organizations offering free, routine, home-based care provide samadhanam (peace of mind) and swatantrayam (self-determination) in lifeworlds mired with chronic waiting. We document how community care sustains an alternative politics of shared time, untethered from marketized notions of efficiency and productivity toward profits. In so doing, we cast in high relief community healthcare imaginaries that alleviate serious health-related suffering and reconfigure Global North-centric perspectives.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":"43 4","pages":"338-352"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Medical Anthropology","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2024.2351066","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/5/16 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
We explore the temporalities that shape and alleviate serious health-related suffering among those with chronic and terminal conditions in Kerala, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2019, we examine the entanglements between waiting for care within dominant institutions and the community organizing that palliates this waiting. Specifically, people navigate multiple medical institutions, experience loneliness and abandonment, loss of autonomy, and delays and denials of recognition as they wait for care. Community palliative care organizations offering free, routine, home-based care provide samadhanam (peace of mind) and swatantrayam (self-determination) in lifeworlds mired with chronic waiting. We document how community care sustains an alternative politics of shared time, untethered from marketized notions of efficiency and productivity toward profits. In so doing, we cast in high relief community healthcare imaginaries that alleviate serious health-related suffering and reconfigure Global North-centric perspectives.
期刊介绍:
Medical Anthropology provides a global forum for scholarly articles on the social patterns of ill-health and disease transmission, and experiences of and knowledge about health, illness and wellbeing. These include the nature, organization and movement of peoples, technologies and treatments, and how inequalities pattern access to these. Articles published in the journal showcase the theoretical sophistication, methodological soundness and ethnographic richness of contemporary medical anthropology. Through the publication of empirical articles and editorials, we encourage our authors and readers to engage critically with the key debates of our time. Medical Anthropology invites manuscripts on a wide range of topics, reflecting the diversity and the expanding interests and concerns of researchers in the field.