Health Education Research, Vol. 16, No. 2, 121-130,
April 2001
© 2001 Oxford University Press
The benefits of anthropological approaches for health promotion research and practice
Departments of Health Ethics and Philosophy, and
1 Health Education, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands,
2 Department of Health Promotion Research and Development, Medical Research Council, PO Box 19070, Tygerberg 7505, Cape Town, South Africa, and
3 Human Sciences Research Council, PB X41, Pretoria, South Africa
In recent years health education practitioners have been looking for ways to extend the social psychological analysis of human behavior with approaches that focus on the cultural and social context of human behavior. In this article the value of the `thick description' approach, borrowed from anthropology, is explored by examples from the Caribbean and South Africa. It demonstrates that an anthropological approach has much to offer as a basis for sound interventions for understanding human behavior. However, although an anthropological approach offers valuable starting points for interventions, its broad scope exceeds the traditional goals of health education (changing health beliefs, health counseling). Interventions will not aim at informing individuals, but at improving cultures. They may concern the change of basic cultural and social structures such as gender roles. To limit the risk of ethnocentrism, adequate ways need to be developed to make optimal use of the information thick description offers, while avoiding ethnocentrism. The article ends with a discussion concerning the assets of a dialogical approach towards health promotion. A dialogue between health promoters and their target population may help solve the problem of ethnocentrism in broadly scoped interventions.
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