Health Education Research, Vol. 15, No. 4, 508-510,
August 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press
Book Review |
Health and Culture: Beyond the Western Paradigm
Professor and Director, Program in Urban Public Health, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York
In a world increasingly knit together by international trade, immigration and electronic communications, patterns of health and disease are shaped by both global and local forces. In order to address these two dimensions of health adequately, health educators must simultaneously acknowledge the distinct cultural characteristics of the populations they serve and the common bonds that link humanity. These two books can help health educators to chart a moral, political and programmatic course between culturally specific and more universal approaches, and to understand better the tensions between them.
Health and Culture by C. O. Airhihenbuwa, Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University, provides a critique of Eurocentric approaches to culture, health and health promotion. The author argues that European and North American paradigms underestimate the role of culture in health, emphasize an authoritarian style of education which dichotomizes teaching and learning, define development in narrow economic terms, and favor medical rather than
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