Abstract
This article investigates the popular participation in health in neighborhoods of the periphery of La Plata (Argentina) in a context of emptying of social policies according to the neo-liberal regulations that govern with increasing force in the country and in the continent. In this framework of economic crisis that especially affects public health, social movements are organized to defend, while resisting daily impoverishment and building popular and collective health alternatives. The work, sustained in an ethnographic investigation, aims to reconstruct the ways in which the subjects reconfigure the ways of thinking about health and political participation in the daily life of the territories through different tactics and strategies of care and community-political construction.
Highlights
Health constitutes a field of social and political dispute in which different discourses converge both to build and to install certain senses and to define the forms of intervention and regulation through public policies
Health is a category in dispute in which multiple discourses converge to influence the orientation of public policies and the practical resolution of daily life in relation to the processes of health, disease, and care
We used a qualitative methodology with an ethnographic approach to interpret the perspectives of women who live and work in neighborhoods of the outskirts of La Plata and participate in the MLJ, what Geertz calls “the actor’s perspective”[8]
Summary
Health constitutes a field of social and political dispute in which different discourses converge both to build and to install certain senses and to define the forms of intervention and regulation through public policies. An initial question to introduce our perspective is in the way we define it, as a complex, historically and culturally constructed concept that involves biological processes as well as social, political and moral ones Traditionally it has been defined from a biological, ahistorical and located within the medical discipline, today other dimensions and fields of knowledge are affecting, assuming that the biological is present but that each cultural configuration has created and disputed senses and values on what healthy means. Anthropological studies teach us that concepts are defined by a specific historical framework that exposes them in context and relates them to other signifiers and meanings[4] From this perspective, the categories that order social life are always ethnographic, in the sense that they are constructed situationally in social interactions. We will analyze the self-managed health project of the Mutual Senderos, “the Mutual of Workers of the Popular Economy”
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