Abstract
We characterized and analyzed women’s narrative around the idea of becoming asustado (scared)as a cultural way of understanding why children get sick repeatedly or develop illnesses that become increasingly severe, as part of a study carried out in rural communities from the Molinos District, in the North-West of Argentina. We analyze and discuss the implications of becoming asustado for everyday child-rearing and children's health, sociability, and performance in different community endeavors from ethnographic data. We intentionally selected 15 cases elaborated based on 55 semi-structured interviews with 15 women, between 25 and 55 years old, all caregivers of children under 6 years old. Our results show that susto (fright) serves as an explanation for those people who do not fit with cultural expectations about their phenotype and social performance. Also, it is a culturally acceptable way of dealing with both physical and mental stress.
Highlights
It is broadly accepted in contemporary research about children’s health and development that medical knowledge should sustain a dialogue with several disciplines that approach children's lives from different questions and perspectives
We describe susto(fright) and its conception that an individual consists of a body and of variants as health problems that affect an immaterial substance that can separate itself from children’s development pathways based on the narrative the body, wander around freely, or else remain captive about therapeutic itineraries of women/caregivers of from supernatural forces
Results a) Becoming asustado: the impact of susto in children’s development trajectories Based on our qualitative analysis of women’s narratives of their therapeutic itineraries and following the arguments presented before, we characterize how mothers of children under six years old, who have suffered themselves from susto, link this illness to specific stressful or traumatic events that happened at certain moments in their life trajectories, in the perinatal stage
Summary
It is broadly accepted in contemporary research about children’s health and development that medical knowledge should sustain a dialogue with several disciplines that approach children's lives from different questions and perspectives. An increasing number its implications at a theoretical and empirical level of people visit the hospital or one of the sanitary posts, (Tseng, 2006) This classification has raised some illnesses are still being treated in the domestic controversies, since some authors state that all realm or with the advice of medicos campesinos knowledge and experiences related to health and (peasant doctors or traditional healers) because illnesses are culturally constructed and, biomedicine is not considered capable of diagnosing depend on each cultural context. The need for a transdisciplinary approach to these leading role in shaping and organizing children’s issues, discussing categories and models for physical and social settings Following this idea, we explaining growth and developmental process in seek to understand local ethnotheories about children’s childhood and children’s vulnerability in specific health, development, and wellbeing in the framework of cultural contexts, by integrating socio-cultural, more comprehensive cultural ideas about the person, emotional and organic factors into explanations. The interviewees gave their free and informed consent by provisions of Argentinian law 25,326, and personal data have been protected by using an identifier that corresponds to a database whose access is restricted to the authors
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