Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Social Health In the New Millenium

We often think of illness as something that happens to a person or within a person. Yet illness (and health) can also be productively understood as something that happens between people. This insight lies at the heart of a remarkably creative field of study – that of social health and healing, which Steven Feierman was instrumental in establishing. Feierman has explored the political, intellectual, and existential aspects of social health, opening fundamental questions about knowledge production, political practice, and the human dimensions of care and affliction. We propose a conference that takes stock of this intellectual legacy and most of all pursues the newest directions in the study of social health both within Africa and globally.

Feierman’s and others’ cross-cultural approach to “social health” opens the history of illness and suffering beyond biomedicine, suggesting that medical histories must always be embedded, at least implicitly, in social and cultural history. In Africa and elsewhere, social health locates health, wealth, and social reproduction as central motivating forces underlying local knowledge and agency from early times through colonial to contemporary times. Many scholars in this field have given the social dimensions of health and healing a privileged analytical position in understanding and studying colonial and postcolonial Africa, India, and other regions. But histories that deploy a notion of “social health” need not relate only to medical, bodily, and healing practice in colonial and postcolonial situations. Rather, the concept can be a fruitful one for those working on myriad forms of human struggle for dignity, decency, recognition, and care in different cultures and places.

Scholarship in social health has positioned the study of biomedicine inside historical, sociological, and anthropological practice while at the same time opening pathways to naturalize an ethnographic approach to illness in the larger work of medical doctors. Most recently this work has culminated in writings that query international models of bio-medicine as an abstract and universal therapeutic system, rather than as a highly situated and thereby politically and economically crafted domain of practice with unpredictable priorities and effects. This field also questions the boundary between the cultures of biomedicine/science and the humanities while it crosses cultural and national divides.

The conference "Social Health in the New Millennium" will bring together scholars from diverse disciplines and from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the U.S. to contemplate key dimensions of social health and their relevance to global health concerns. We tentatively plan to organize the meeting around pre-circulated papers in three panels. One panel will look at the historical and cross-cultural dimensions of the meanings of care. A second panel will focus on how social health helps illuminate the challenges facing health care practices in both resource poor and affluent contexts. A third panel will explore African histories of social health and violence. An open roundtable discussion, conducted at the close of the conference, will raise critical questions and conclusions from these and other papers, stimulate discussion about the organization of published conference proceedings, and point the way to developing new scholarship in this area.

We envision this conference and any resulting publication to be much more than a Festschrift, although Feierman’s remarkable intellectual generosity is certainly worthy of celebration. At the local level, this conference will serve to generate interest in the planned exhibition at the University Museum on 'African Healing Journeys,’ for which Feierman has been a primary consultant. At the national and international level, the concept of social health appears more vital than ever before. We face the rise of “personalized medicine” and the pharmaceuticalization of public health, amid the decline of social networks and social capital that underlie health globally and in the U.S. Across much of Africa the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, crises of reproduction and bodily violence, and the hollowing out of health infrastructure pose deep challenges to productive practices of health and caring that sustain communities as moral, political, and social collectivities. Intellectually, we are experiencing the waning of post-modernism and the cultural turn in humanistic scholarship, the growing influence of Science and Technology Studies with its careful attention to simultaneously situating objects and practice, and a reconfiguration of area studies amid a new emphasis paid to transnational networks of knowledge, goods, and people. The time is right to think through social health and how our commitments to care for one another and to sustain and seek health unfold on the ground, and through historical, intellectual, and techno-scientific practice.