Repositori URV

Identifier: TDX:1456

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX1456

Authors:
Lasala Meseguer, Antonio

Abstract:
This work researches the ways of managing the health-illness-caring process in ten villages in the North of Teruel with a population of 7,000 all together. We are all concerned about what happens when someone of their inhabitants get sick, taking for granted that it is either the family or the nearest social circle which must foot the first intervention, wondering which specialist consultants would be the suitable to go in case their own knowledges failed. Strategies arisen within patients, doctors and folk healers are studied to set up the connections among the following medical patterns they represent: Selfcaring Pattern, Hegemonic Medical one and Alternative Subordinated one.We may assume that illnesses and their treatments cannot be explained by biological conditionings, but also understanding the socioculturals factors as co-determinants of the medical assistance conditions. We are to set three crucial axes: the social agents viewpoint, the representations and practising system and the related viewpoint, the latter sought the help of the Hegemony and Subalternity concepts. To deal with objectively, other two items are checked out accuretely: Graciousness and Symbolic Efficacy, which are being applied to a methodology that includes the looking over the historical data, a participant observation, formal interviews and informal conversations. The legitimation devices, the cultural shaping and the importance of the settling infrastructure are studied to know both the meaning of the public health services and the quackery practice. The text has been divided into eight chapters:The first of them contains a concise checking of the medical anthropology in which this study is taking in, as well as the theoretical and conceptual setting, the applied methodology and the h