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Health Hazard (s) :
A QUANDARY FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF HEALTH
Anand Kashyap
For the past few decades, a gamut of loaded words, quite interconnected with each other and carrying a common philosophy of consumeristic utilitarianism, has been doled out by the economically advanced countries in the developing Third World. Such words are : poverty and development, tradition and modernity, health and disease, and many other ideologically charged concepts that have been used as leyers and motivators of socio-economic transformation in the developing world. It has become amply clear by now that this developmentalistic' ideology, emanating from the metropolitan west, is not merely a philanthropic or an altruistic gesture towards the Third World but provides a new cloak or mystique to hegemonize and colonize them by inculcating an unceasing techno-economic and, to a great extent, even a cultural dependence upon them. In fact, to quote Berger (1973), it is a planned development of the under-development and in Ivan Illich's (1980) words a 'planned poverty' against which he calls for the celebration of awareness'. It is this 'celebration of awareness' that has provoked me to look the problem of health and disease in this perspective and try to understand their latent meanings, for a country like ours which may be lagging behind economically but culturally it is not so poor.
To my mind, it is a responsibility of the Indian intellectual in general and a social scientist or a social anthropologist in particular to demystify such ideological packages and examine them critically with reference to our socio-cultural requirements and priorities.
A definition of health' and specially that of mental health' mostly depends upon the concept of man and the concept of 'normalcy' prevailing in a particular culture and society.
lofluence of Renaissant-Enlightenment Europe, progress theories and evolutionary doctrines is quite vivid on the concept of man obtaining in the modern western thought and society. All these doctrines are primarily based on the assumption that it is 'abundance' and not the 'frugality' that brings happiness in life and abundance could be procured only through the power of science and technology. This rational-empirical view has evoked a bio-social or
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