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Sociologists have tended to construct theories of identity based on unitary notions of social location which avoid conceptualizing disjunction and contradiction and which therefore fail to capture certain characteristics of the postcolonial condition. This paper engages in a postcolonial re-reading of sociological theories of practice (in particular, Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus). It does so through an analysis of the historical development of the field of health and healing in South Africa. From the beginning of the colonial enterprise, biomedicine resisted amalgamation with other forms of healing and insisted on a monotherapeutic ideology and practice whereas indigenous healing accommodated not only biomedicine, but invited pluralism within and across cultural and ethnic differences. As such, a bifurcated and parallel system of healing emerged, whereby Black South Africans practiced pluralism and white South Africans utilized biomedicine in isolation. This disjuncture became acrimonious in the post-apartheid era as the state attempted to forge a united health system and battle the AIDS epidemic. Despite the historical and contemporary bifurcations within the field of health and healing, people living with AIDS continue to subscribe to a hybrid health ideology. There is, therefore, a structural disjuncture between the realities of consumption within the field of health and healing and the logic of the field as it is articulated in the symbolic struggle raging in the field of power. The field of health and healing is characterized, therefore, by a simultaneous bifurcation and hybridity – which is reflected in HIV-infected South Africans’ beliefs and practices. In order to make sense of this puzzling disjuncture and its impact on subjects’ trajectories of action, this paper draws insight from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus and Homi Bhabha's conceptualization of hybridity – transforming each of them through their synthesis and application to the postcolonial context.

Based on ethnographic data and a textual analysis, this chapter highlights the process of “therapization” of Buddhism in Western countries, with a specific emphasis on Tibetan Buddhism in France. Referring to the paradigm of “political economy of health”, as developed in recent medical anthropology, it attempts to explore the relationships between two concepts – economics and health – that had previously been considered separately, in the context of Western Buddhism. Further, this chapter's aim is to expose a potential application of theoretical economic models in an anthropological approach of Buddhist diffusion and appropriation in the West.

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as a topic of research and as an approach within the health care delivery system has become increasingly accepted. Aided by the holistic movement, and after a century and a half of striving for legitimacy, CAM is also increasingly becoming more accepted by mainstream medicine. This chapter reviews the social sources of disparities in use of CAM, with a greater focus on English-speaking countries, and especially the US. This chapter will briefly highlight the basic underlying principles of CAM as linked to its history and discuss types of CAM. The major focus of this chapter will be a review of the literature on social factors and use of CAM, looking at such factors as age, gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity and immigration status, and health status. As part of this, we will also discuss the integration of CAM and conventional care. In conclusion, future directions for social science research in CAM will be discussed, specifically elaborating on the importance of the social sciences linking CAM with other growing interests in health and wellness.

Dramatic urbanization in Latin America is causing an increasing proportion of indigenous groups to migrate from rural areas to urban centers. In Peru, this population is primarily comprised of the Quechua-speaking Indians. The cultural marginalization of Quechua in urban areas has left these communities with limited access to basic services such as health care. Quechua women are disproportionately affected by adverse health outcomes due to their economic dependency on their husbands and lack of Spanish language knowledge. In order to investigate this topic, I brought together information from multiple disciplines, consulting government data, ethnographic studies and social research, and studies conducted on health outcomes. It becomes apparent from this information that Quechua women suffer from high incidences of adolescent pregnancies, unsafe abortions, and domestic violence. These health issues are linked to their traditional beliefs and practices and their economic condition. In order to properly address this issue, it is imperative to increase Quechua translators in medical facilities, allow for greater access to sexual education and contraceptives, and to provide culturally competent care that incorporates both traditional and Western practices.

This study examines the decision process of household members in visiting local health care providers. It also explores the effect of various household level socioeconomic factors on motivating rural people to visit traditional versus modern health care providers in rural Bangladesh. I used the Population, Environment, and Poverty data collected from eight villages of rural Bangladesh in 1998 in addition to self-collected ethnographic survey information. The data suggest that a large majority of rural households attempt to visit locally available untrained health care providers first, and then trained doctors as the sickness worsens. The data also suggest that socio-cultural and economic factors are important in shaping their decision to visit traditional as opposed to modern health care providers. Training the traditional and untrained health care providers will be a wise option to ensure health care to the villagers.

Internationalisation of education is often regarded as preparing students to work in a globalised world. Our graduates are not only workers and consumers of the increasingly global labour market, but they are also people, friends, parents, colleagues, neighbours, partners, voters and (global) citizens. Attitudes towards oneself and other people, and the underlying values that these attitudes are based on, poses challenges to quality education. Education in the context of globalisation needs to be inclusive and equitable in order to be of quality (United Nations, 2015), but what does this look like in practice? What does it require of students, and for those responsible for designing education? Do students and teachers have the possibility to reflect on and conceptualise the realities they live in? Apart from knowledge and technical skills, what growth mindset do students and teachers need in order to navigate international and intercultural perspectives responsibly and ethically?

This chapter proposes to address these questions through the prism of four teachers in the field of global health education. The students they teach and interact with, as well as their needs as active citizens in a globalised world, will provide the backdrop for further reflection. The personal journeys of the authors between countries, disciplines, professions, learning and teaching will thus be conceptualised as experiences continuously being reconstructed and deconstructed in the classroom through processes of being, belonging and becoming. It is argued that these processes can be used as resources to create inclusive and equitable quality education.

This chapter explores theory and local context of socially constructed pandemic fears during COVID-19; how material and non-material fear objects are construed, interpreted and understood by communities, and how fears disrupt social norms and influence pandemic behavioural responses. We aimed to understand the lived experiences of pandemic-induced fears in socioculturally diverse communities in eastern Indonesia in the context of onto-epistemological disjunctures between biomedically derived public health interventions, local world views and causal-remedial explanations for the crisis. Ethnographic research conducted among several communities in East Nusa Tenggara province in Indonesia provided the data and analyses presented in this chapter, delineating the extent to which fear played a decisive role in both internal, felt experience and social relations. Results illustrate how fear emotions are constructed and acted upon during times of crisis, arising from misinformation, rumour, socioreligious influence, long-standing tradition and community understandings of modernity, power and biomedicine. The chapter outlines several sociological theories on fear and emotion and interrogates a post-pandemic future.