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From a grandmother's inter-generational care to the strategic and slow consensus work of elected tribal leaders, Indigenous community builders perform the daily work of culture and communalism. Indigenous Communalism conveys age-old lessons about culture, communalism, and the universal tension between the individual and the collective. It is also a critical ethnography challenging the moral and cultural assumptions of a hyper-individualist, twenty-first century global society. Told in vibrant detail, the narrative of the book conveys the importance of communalism as a value system present in all human groups and one at the center of Indigenous survival. Carolyn Smith-Morris draws on her work among the Akimel O'odham and the Wiradjuri to show how communal work and culture help these communities form distinctive Indigenous bonds. The results are not only a rich study of Indigenous relational lifeways, but a serious inquiry to the continuing acculturative atmosphere that Indigenous communities struggle to resist. Recognizing both positive and negative sides to the issue, she asks whether there is a global Indigenous communalism. And if so, what lessons does it teach about healthy communities, the universal human need for belonging, and the potential for the collective to do good?

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

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