Children, Health and Well-Being: A Cultural Perspective

This course provides students insight into the relation between culture and child health and offers them anthropological methods to develop a child-centred perspective in this field.

In the last decades, social scientists have raised important questions concerning the existence of a specific child perspective and the role of children as creative social actors. In the field of medical anthropology, the critical situation of children in areas of conflict and extreme poverty lends a strong urgency to these questions. Devastating effects of economic marginalisation, wars and old and new epidemics create generations of children for whom the concepts of 'childhood', 'dependency', and 'health' have meanings very different from those in so called 'traditional societies' which were the focus of earlier ethnographies of childhood. The cultural diversity of urban populations, the effects of migration and displacement and the social marginalisation of minority groups challenge the structures, procedures and effectiveness of established health care institutions and their professionals.