Abstract
This review article discusses the text Kanosa - Grameen Streechya Sharir ani Manatil Gupitancha, translated as ‘Lending an Ear to the Secrets of Body and Mind of the Rural Woman’ by Dr. Rani Bang. The original text provides detailed information on various life-cycle health experiences of women; illness categories (nosography); health practices; sexualities; diets and local life-worlds of health and bodily experiences based on the in depth discussions with local women. In the context of current trends and prevailing ideologies in the community health sector of India, our critical review highlights the significance of the approach adopted by Dr. Rani Bang in locating health as an integral part of culture.We seek to introduce important discussions in Bang’s text on ethnophysiology, local categories of diseases and their implications on modern community health interventions, as ell as the definitions of the normal, abnormal and pathological as provided by the local community. In light of these discussions, we examine certain characteristics of the modern Indian community health sector such as its inability to work with local epistemologies of health and illness and its philosophical reliance on Cartesian dualism and western notions of personhood. Certain features of community health such as complete separation of fertility and sexuality as well as the exclusively nutritional approach to dietary phenomena are also reviewed with reference to Kanosa and other significant literature.
Highlights
This journal is published by theUniversity Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
If there is any opposition to a particular health intervention by any community, the consequence is that the community is held responsible for its restricted approach and lack of adaptation to development and policy implementation
Culture and Society intervention and strategy, in turn, often appears as a corrosive sublimate of private interests and state power mechanisms, serving the interests of industry and its actors. Against this backdrop of cultural and scientific tensions, the work of Dr Rani Bang as put forward in the text entitled Kanosa, stands out in its approach, for it seeks to bring to light, and appreciate, local health cosmologies in order to integrate them into the program design of community health initiatives
Summary
The Community health sector in India has transformed itself significantly over the last sixty years. Culture and Society intervention and strategy, in turn, often appears as a corrosive sublimate of private interests and state power mechanisms, serving the interests of industry and its actors Against this backdrop of cultural and scientific tensions, the work of Dr Rani Bang as put forward in the text entitled Kanosa, stands out in its approach, for it seeks to bring to light, and appreciate, local health cosmologies in order to integrate them into the program design of community health initiatives. In highlighting the significance of the approach adopted by Dr Bang in her locating health as an integral part of culture, other optics, ways of seeing and reading, can be given podium and visibility These discussions, in turn, shed greater, critical light on certain characteristics and limitations of the modern community health sector of India. The life historical is reduced to the statistical, and nosography to a generalized measure
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