Diabetes, Biography, and Community

Abstract

Chapters 6 and 7 have explored two interrelated aspects of the participants’ experience of the cultural embedding of type 2 diabetes. The process of being diagnosed, anxieties and fears about diabetes, and help-seeking in biomedical and herbal/traditional forms emerged as integral to a more nuanced view of diabetes. There is also the conceptual and practical juggling that takes place and the locating of this within a cultural context which emerged as themes. This is central to telling the story of people’s experiences and demonstrates how people actually respond to the illness, using varieties of experiences, skills, ideas, and methods located and sourced in their lived socialities. Participants, time and again, regardless of the material positions they were observed to be in, are playing out active notions of culture and ethnicity, using all the linguistic, faith, migration experiences, and tools they have in order to negotiate the social and cultural terrain. People are, as they seem to be indicating here, still not ‘cultural dopes’ (Garfinkel 1984: 68. Certainly, if Avtar Brah’s (1996) groundbreaking work on the complexities of South Asian diaspora is to be continuously celebrated, these daily, normalised, routine life–health activities are part of a deeper embedded fabric of migration and cultural history. As Brah (2007) and others have consistently argued, these biographical identities are not fixed, static, or uni-dimensional. Rather, they are socialities formed in terms of both similarity and difference, which are non-binarised. ‘Identity then, is always in process, never an absolutely accomplished fact’ (Brah 2007: 139). However, the potential ‘unruliness of identity’ does not stop social actors from feeling a sense of identity stability, since identity is ‘…constituted…articulated and expressed through identifications within and across different discourses.’ (Brah 2007: 143) I raise these issues at this point in the book because how diabetes—the entire package—is managed by policymakers, service providers, and diabetics themselves is fundamentally mediated by these processes of identity making.