Download or read book Health Care in Maya Guatemala written by John Palmer Hawkins and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines medical systems and institutions in three K'iche' Maya communities to reveal the conflicts between indigenous medical care and the Guatemalan biomedical system. It shows the necessity of cultural understanding if poor people are to have access to medicine that combines the best of both local tradition and international biomedicine.
Download or read book Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism written by Anita Chary and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism is the first collection of its kind to explore the contemporary terrain of healthcare in Guatemala through reflective ethnography. This volume offers a nuanced portrait of the effects of healthcare privatization for indigenous Maya people, who have historically endured numerous disparities in health and healthcare access. The collection provides an updated understanding of medical pluralism, which concerns not only the tensions and exchanges between ethnomedicine and biomedicine that have historically shaped Maya people’s experiences of health, but also the multiple competing biomedical institutions that have emerged in a highly privatized, market-driven environment of care. The contributors examine the macro-structural and micro-level implications of the proliferation of non-governmental organizations, private fee-for-service clinics, and new pharmaceuticals against the backdrop of a deteriorating public health system. In this environment, health seekers encounter new challenges and opportunities, relationships between the public, private, and civil sectors transform, and new forms of inequality in access to healthcare abound. This volume connects these themes to critical studies of global and public health, exposing the strictures and apertures of healthcare privatization for marginalized populations in Guatemala.
Download or read book Health Care Perspectives written by Rikki Nitzkin and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Guatemala written by Peter Rohloff and published by Dartmouth College Press. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students and health practitioners traveling abroad seek insightful and relevant background material to orient them to the new environment. This volume on Guatemala provides historical, political, and cultural background for contemporary health care challenges, especially related to poverty. Combining the personal insights of the authors and Guatemalan medical personnel with a broader discussion of the uniquely Guatemalan context, it is an essential guide for anyone heading to Guatemala to do health care-related work.
Download or read book Health in the Highlands written by David Carey Jr. and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Populated by curanderos, midwives, bonesetters, witches, doctors, nurses, and the indigenous people they served, this nuanced history demonstrates how cultural and political history, misogyny, racism, and racialization influence public health. In the first half of the twentieth century, the governments of Ecuador and Guatemala sought to spread scientific medicine to their populaces, working to prevent and treat malaria, typhus, and typhoid; to boost infant and maternal well-being; and to improve overall health. Drawing on extensive, original archival research, David Carey Jr. shows that highland indigenous populations in the two countries tended to embrace a syncretic approach to health, combining traditional and new practices. At times, both governments encouraged—or at least allowed—such a synthesis: even what they saw as "nonscientific" care was better than none. Yet both, especially Guatemala's, also wrote off indigenous lifeways and practices with both explicit and implicit racism, going so far as to criminalize native medical providers and to experiment on indigenous people without their consent. Both nations had authoritarian rule, but Guatemala's was outright dictatorial, tending to treat both women and indigenous people as subjects to be controlled and policed. Ecuador, on the other hand, advanced a more pluralistic vision of national unity, and had somewhat better outcomes as a result.
Download or read book Unsafe Motherhood written by Nicole S. Berry and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally.
Download or read book Health in the Highlands written by David Carey, Jr. and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the early to mid-twentieth century, the governments of Ecuador and Guatemala sought to expand Western medicine within their countries, with the goals of addressing endemic diseases and improving infant and maternal health. These efforts often clashed with indigenous medical practices, particularly in the rural highlands. Drawing on extensive, original archival research, historian David Carey Jr. shows that indigenous populations embraced a syncretic approach to health, combining traditional and new practices. At times, the governments of both nations encouraged--or at least allowed--such a synthesis, yet they also attacked indigenous lifeways, going so far as to criminalize native medical practitioners and to conduct medical experiments on indigenous people without consent. Health in the Highlands traces the experiences of curanderos, midwives, bonesetters, witches, doctors, and nurses--and the indigenous people they served. Carey interrogates the relationship between 'progressive' public health policy and indigenous well-being, offering lessons from the past that remain relevant in the present. Our best way forward, this history suggests, may be a compassionate syncretism that joins indigenous approaches to healing with science and a pursuit of environmental and social justice"--
Download or read book Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala written by John P. Hawkins and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The possibility of violence beneath a thin veneer of civil society is a fact of daily life for twenty-first-century Guatemalans, from field laborers to the president of the country. Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala explores the causes and consequences of governmental failure by focusing on life in two K’iche’ Maya communities in the country’s western highlands. The contributors to this volume, who lived among the villagers for some time, include both undergraduate students and distinguished scholars. They describe the ways Mayas struggle to survive and make sense of their lives, both within their communities and in relation to the politico-economic institutions of the nation and the world. Since Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war ended in 1996, the state has been dysfunctional, the country’s economy precarious, and physical safety uncertain. The intrusion of Mexican cartels led the U.S. State Department to declare Guatemala “the epicenter of the drug threat” in Central America. Rapid cultural change, weak state governance, organized crime, pervasive corruption, and ethnic exclusion provide the backdrop for the studies in this volume. Seven nuanced ethnographies collected here reveal the complexities of indigenous life and describe physical and cultural conflicts within and between villages, between insiders and outsiders, and between local and federal governments. Many of these essays point to a tragic irony:the communities seem largely forgotten by the government until the state seeks to capture their resources—timber, minerals, votes. Other chapters portray villages responding to criminal activity through lynch mobs and by labeling nonconformist youth as gang members. In focusing on the internal dynamics of poor, marginal communities in Guatemala, this book explores the realities of life for indigenous people on all continents who are faced with the social changes brought about by war and globalization.
Download or read book A New Dawn in Guatemala written by Richard Luecke and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Time Among the Maya written by Ronald Wright and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Maya created one of the world's most brilliant civilizations, famous for its art, astronomy, and deep fascination with the mystery of time. Despite collapse in the ninth century, Spanish invasion in the sixteenth, and civil war in the twentieth, eight million people in Guatemala, Belize, and southern Mexico speak Mayan languages and maintain their resilient culture to this day. Traveling through Central America's jungles and mountains, Ronald Wright explores the ancient roots of the Maya, their recent troubles, and prospects for survival. Embracing history, anthropology, politics, and literature, Time Among the Maya is a riveting journey through past magnificence and the study of an enduring civilization with much to teach the present. "Wright's unpretentious narrative blends anthropology, archaeology, history, and politics with his own entertaining excursions and encounters." -- The New Yorker; "Time Among the Maya shows Wright to be far more than a mere storyteller or descriptive writer. He is an historical philosopher with a profound understanding of other cultures." -- Jan Morris, The Independent (London).
Download or read book Wellness Beyond Words written by T. S. Harvey and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This anthropological account of Maya language use in health care in highland Guatemala explores some of the cultural and linguistic factors that can complicate communication in the practice of medicine. Bringing together the analytical tools of linguistic and medical anthropology, T. S. Harvey offers a rare comparative glimpse into Maya intra-cultural therapeutic and cross-cultural biomedical interactions"--
Download or read book Tecpan Guatemala written by Edward F Fischer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the indigenous people of Tecpan Guatemala, a predominantly Kaqchikel Maya town in the Guatemalan highlands. It seeks to build on the traditional strengths of ethnography while rejecting overly romantic and isolationist tendencies in the genre.
Download or read book Refractions of doing Good written by Anna Christina Martinez-Hume and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a global scale, NGOs have played an important role in development and addressing healthcare inequities over the last several decades. Yet in recent years, the work of NGOs is continuously impacted by processes of socio-cultural, political, and economic change in increasingly post-neoliberal contexts. NGOs working within a social justice framework for health are a unique area to examine this shift as they continue to operate in the ebb and flow of changing fields of social power. The Guatemalan context has provided a salient example of this process, as changes in NGO-state relationships, health policy, and an increasingly pro-impunity state that protects perpetuators of corruption, have steadily impacted the subjectivities, resources, and practices of those working for NGOs. This dissertation explores the changing socio-political healthcare climate in Guatemala and its effects on the abilities of NGO workers to continue serving the needs of marginalized Indigenous Maya communities in the intersecting fields of health and social justice. Subjectivity is a useful theoretical framework for understanding how this larger shift in socio-political context impacts the actions, perceptions, and experiences of NGO workers involved in health intervention.This dissertation is guided by the notion that subjectivity is the site in which larger socio-cultural, economic, and political forces shaping social policy can likewise be seen to shape actors immersed in the ramifications of policy change. I propose that subjectivity is an amalgamation of individually, institutionally, and politically formed subjectivities. NGO worker's subjective realities are individually formed through their unique personal experiences and identities; institutionally formed through the structure, history, and agenda of their organizations and funding institutions; and politically formed through their intrinsic and fluctuating relationship with the state and government institutions.This dissertation presents findings from a research project conducted over several summers between 2014 and 2019 exploring NGO workers' experiences in health intervention from multiple NGOs in Guatemala. Utilizing semi-structured interviews, participant observation, textual and discourse analysis, this dissertation examines how NGO workers continue to serve Indigenous Maya communities despite dramatic shifts in state supports for NGOs. This work discusses how factors such as identity, indigeneity, and institutional legacy can impact the health interventions and community activism implemented in Indigenous communities. NGO workers navigate both their personal subjectivity as Indigenous individuals with unique connections to the Maya community, and an institutional subjectivity as actors immersed in NGO rhetorics of development. These competing subjectivities yielded profoundly gendered understandings of empowerment and feminist solidarity within approaches for health intervention. NGO workers also possess institutional and political subjectivities that are defined by a complex relationship with the state. Health activism in the context of NGOs can be transmuted over time through contractual relationships with the state whereby bureaucratic policies that place value on managerialism over social justice, thoroughly shift the nature and content of health intervention. Ultimately, I argue there is a fundamental link between non-governmental and government institutions, as NGO workers' political subjectivities are continuously shaped by politically driven policy change, authoritative discourse, and popular belief. It is through this fundamental link with the state where regimes of truth manifest that can ultimately manipulate the actions of NGOs, refracting their perceptions of "doing good" for the most marginalized.
Download or read book Maya Bonesetters written by Servando Z. Hinojosa and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarship on Maya healing traditions has focused primarily on the roles of midwives, shamans, herbalists, and diviners. Bonesetters, on the other hand, have been largely excluded from conversations about traditional health practitioners and community health resources. Maya Bonesetters is the first book-length study of bonesetting in Guatemala and situates the manual healing tradition within the current cultural context—one in which a changing medical landscape potentially threatens bonesetters’ work yet presents an opportunity to strengthen its relevance. Drawing on extensive field research in highland Guatemala, Servando Z. Hinojosa introduces readers to a seldom documented, though nonetheless widespread, variety of healer. This book examines the work of Kaqchikel and Tz’utujiil Maya bonesetters, analyzes how they diagnose and treat injuries, and contrasts the empirical and sacred approaches of various healers. Hinojosa shows how bonesetters are carefully adapting certain biomedical technologies to meet local expectations for care and concludes that, despite pressures and criticisms from the biomedical community, bonesetting remains culturally meaningful and vital to Maya people, even if its future remains uncertain.
Download or read book Maya Memories of the Internal Armed Conflict written by Miguel Cuj and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1960's, internal conflict erupted in the majority of Central American countries. Substantial setbacks in economic development, human rights, and social aspects in these countries were the result of the democracy struggling with this conflict. Bogin and Keep (1999) reported that height declined among Mayan and Ladino children from all social classes in Guatemala from 1974 to 1984 (this period included some of the most devastating fighting of the civil war), but an even stronger decline was seen in low-SES (socio economic status), the average height decline around nine centimeters differences between high-SES and low-SES. During the armed conflict, Guatemalans Maya with low-SES suffered irregular supply of water, no safe water, unsanitary condition, economic instability, declines in food production, and lack healthcare. Maya Indians have been to object of massive discrimination and political repression with continuous human rights violations. My thesis examines what kind of implications the internal armed conflict in Guatemala has had on health and nutrition matters in Maya rural life. The violence against the Maya people is the materialization of the structural violence that permeates the body, community, and social fabric. The structural violence perspective allows for a nuanced and global account of the pathogenic effects of health under warfare. My thesis proposes a framework in which to examine the structural, collective, and individual violence embodied in chronic social conditions affecting health and nutrition.
Download or read book Shamans Witches and Maya Priests written by Krystyna Deuss and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlivened with 102 photographs and 50 figures and maps, Shamans, Witches, and Maya Priests explores the "old ways" that still prevail in the Q'anjob'al, Akatek, and Chuj communities of the remote northwestern Cuchumatán Mountains. Krystyna Deuss provides vivid descriptions and images of the traditional rites and rituals she witnessed during fifteen years of fieldwork. These sacred moments include blood sacrifices for the good of the community and private shamanic rituals--as well as black magic. Deuss also includes a selection of the prayers she recorded.
Download or read book Mesoamerican Healers written by Brad R. Huber and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Healing practices in Mesoamerica span a wide range, from traditional folk medicine with roots reaching back into the prehispanic era to westernized biomedicine. These sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing practices have attracted attention from researchers and the public alike, as interest in alternative medicine and holistic healing continues to grow. Responding to this interest, the essays in this book offer a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of Mesoamerican healers and medical practices in Mexico and Guatemala. The first two essays describe the work of prehispanic and colonial healers and show how their roles changed over time. The remaining essays look at contemporary healers, including bonesetters, curers, midwives, nurses, physicians, social workers, and spiritualists. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, the authors examine such topics as the intersection of gender and curing, the recruitment of healers and their training, healers' compensation and workload, types of illnesses treated and recommended treatments, conceptual models used in diagnosis and treatment, and the relationships among healers and between indigenous healers and medical and political authorities.
