Repositori URV

Identifier: TDX:1888

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX1888

Authors:
Navarro Valencia, Martha Cecilia

Abstract:
The thesis is an interdisciplinary study using social anthropology, the sub-disciplineof health-anthropology, sociology, and gender studies in a case study of a populationof 20 afro-descendent women who live in precarious socio-economic conditions in thecity of Buenaventura, on the Colombian Pacific coast.The central subject is the analysis and description of the perceptions, uses andanswers of these women in face of the problems they experience in relation to the carethey receive regarding their reproductive health. These women use two dominanthealth systems in Buenaventura. These are: publicly funded biomedicine representedby public health professionals in the main city's hospital and traditional healthservices represented by empirical midwifes. The thesis considers those two systemsand describes the situations that lead these women to use one or the other healthsystem and at what point these two health systems are for them an alternative.The subjective experience of these women about the ways of sexual and reproductivehealth care, and also the statements from the other persons implied in the study -public health professionals and empiric midwifes - are reported. Ethnography is thecentral method for approaching the research problem. Archival research is also usedas well as some aggregate data.The theoretical framework is in the interpretative perspective. It departs from theassumption that the study subjects - the afro-descendent women of Buenaventurahavethe capacity of interpreting their circumstances, of adapting to them, ofmanaging them and giving them sense. Or, from the proposal of Berguer andLuckmann (1991) though the subjectivity of individuals reflects the socialdetermination in which they are immersed, it also expresses their interpretativeability. Society as