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"From the tactile descriptions of a grandmother's inter-generational care, to the strategic and slow consensus work of elected tribal leaders, native community builders perform the daily work of constructing culture and nurturing community. Indigenous Communalism describes a critical ethnography of community-building and community builders in the Akimel O'odham of Southern Arizona, and considers what we can learn about culture, and about strong, healthy communities from Indigenous peoples. This ethnography is deeply descriptive of the moral value of communalism, something that is present in all human communities. But Indigenous peoples express and practice it in distinctive ways. As a contrast to the hyper-individualism in most contemporary economic, legal, and scientific discourse, this book promotes critical awareness of individualist assumptions"--

Chronic Conditions, Fluid States explores the uneven impact of chronic illness and disability on individuals, families, and communities in diverse local and global settings. Breaking new ground in medical anthropology by challenging the chronic/acute divide in illness and disease, the editors, along with a group of rising scholars and some of the most influential minds in the field, address the concept of chronicity, an idea used to explain individual and local life-worlds, question public health discourse, and consider the relationship between health and the globalizing forces that shape it

This volume highlights and examines how Indigenous Peoples continue to inhabit the world in counter-modern ways. It illustrates how communalist practices and cooperative priorities of many Indigenous communities are simultaneously key to their cultural survival while being most vulnerable to post-colonial erasure.

As notions of cultural competency have risen to prominence in health care, some of our most powerful models and strategies come from successful tribal health care. In this chapter, we deconstruct notions of cultural competency, rebuilding this important aspect of medical practice under Bourdieu's model of reflexivity (1986). We outline a critical discourse of cultural competency based on a processual (and distinctively anthropological) model. In promoting several specific strategies for culturally competent care, we point to the assumptions regarding the boundedness and neutrality of culture within biomedical practice as well as the authority and power structures through which competency is determined. We offer two case studies: one, an examination of a community-based ambulatory care practice; the second, a consideration of both practitioners' and institutions' use of cultural capital in addressing the community they serve. We promote a reflexive form of culturally competent care that goes beyond "cookbook" uses of cultural capital to move toward an engaged and structurally flexible approach, one that allows the blending of biomedical paradigms with patient culture and history.

Chronic Conditions, Fluid States explores the uneven impact of chronic illness and disability on individuals, families, and communities in diverse local and global settings. To date, much of the social as well as biomedical research has treated the experience of illness and the challenges of disease control and management as segmented and episodic. Breaking new ground in medical anthropology by challenging the chronic/acute divide in illness and disease, the editors, along with a group of rising scholars and some of the most influential minds in the field, address the concept of chronicity, an idea used to explain individual and local life-worlds, question public health discourse, and consider the relationship between health and the globalizing forces that shape it