When Culture Impacts Health

"Banwell, Ulijaszek, and Dixon assemble 30 essays by health sociology, medical and bio-anthropology, cultural anthropology, and epidemiology researchers from Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, and the UK, who provide medical anthropologists and social epidemiologists with conceptual and measurement tools to improve their understanding of how culture affects population health behaviors and chronic and infectious disease risks and demonstrate how public health can influence culture to encourage healthy lifestyles." --Reference and Research Book News, August 2013

• 1. When culture impacts healthPart A – Research approaches2. The antecendents to culture in health research: perspectives from the social sciences3. Biological and biocultural anthropology4. Toward Cultural Epidemiology: Beyond Epistemological Hegemony5. The cultural anthropological contribution to communicable disease epidemiology Part B - Local tales I. Industrial and post-industrial societies6. Medicalisation or medicine as culture? : The case of ADHD7. Filthy fingernails and friendly germs: Lay concepts of contagious disease transmission in developed countries8. Context and environment: The value of considering lay epidemiology9. Identity, social position, wellbeing and health: insights from Australians living with hearing loss 10. Framing debates about risk for skin cancer and vitamin D deficiency in New Zealand: Ethnicity, skin colour and / or cultural practice? 11. Analysing smoking using Te Whare Tapa Wha12. Thirty years of New Zealand smoking advances a case for cultural epidemiology and cultural geography13. On Slimming Pills, Growth Hormones, and Plastic Surgery: The Socioeconomic Value of the Body in South Korea II. Economically transitioning societies14. Tacking between disciplines Approaches to tuberculosis in New Zealand, Cook Islands and Tuvalu15. Social determinants of health in a Papuan village16. Life and well-being under historical ecological variation: the epidemiology of disease and of representations17. Perceptions of Leprosy in the Orang Asli (indigenous minority) of Peninsular Malaysia18. A qualitative exploration of factors affection uptake of water treatment technology in rural Bangladesh19. Anthropological approaches to outbreak investigations in Bangladesh20. Post-Disaster Coping in Aceh: Sociocultural Factors and Emotional ResponsePart C – Methodological Lessons21. Non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians: cultural-social positioning and health22. Capturing the capitals; a heuristic for measuring ‘wealth’ of NZ children in the 21st century. An application to the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal cohort23. Cultural consensus modeling of disease24. Meaning and measurement – research with African immigrants in Australia25. The cultural economy approach to studying chronic disease risks, with application to illicit drug use26. Doing health policy research: how to interview policy elites27. Thai food culture in transition: a mixed methods study on the role of food retailing28. Developing culturally appropriate interventions to prevent person-to person transmission of Nipah Virus in Bangladesh: cultural epidemiology in actionConclusion29. From local tales to global lessons30. Complementary readings