Abstract
The paradigm we have outlined for understanding religion and the health of the public rests partly on the credibility of each component idea, and partly on how those components as a whole serve the work of better reflection and action. Here we reflect on one last critical component, the link between the health of the public on one hand, and polity and economy on the other. This link seems obvious, as farming is to weather and climate. However, no aspect is as challenging or contested, and we tread warily in this respect. Faith, health, politics, and economics: each is an aspect of human life that might be designed to rule the others, each has appeared to do so in different times and places, and each is complex beyond measure.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London; New York: Penguin & Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 8. 2. Ibid., 12. 3. Ibid., 263.
Recognizing Foucault’s work on these themes, including health, we nevertheless frame them somewhat differently; see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Smith (New York: Random House (imprint: Vintage), 1975);
Michel Foucault, Power/knowledge: selected writings and other interviews 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon, et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
United Nations Development Programme, “Human Development Report: International Cooperation at a Crossroads-Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World,” (New York: United Nations, 2005), 55.
B. P. Mpepo, “The Path Away from Poverty: An Easy Look at Zambia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, 2002–2004,” (Lusaka: Civil Society for Poverty Reduction, 2004), 9d.
African Religious Health Assets Programme, “Appreciating Assets: The Contribution of Religion to Universal Access in Africa,” (Cape Town: ARHAP, Report for the World Health Organization, 2006), Appendix D.
African Religious Health Assets Programme, “Appreciating Assets: The Contribution of Religion to Universal Access in Africa,” (Cape Town: ARHAP, Report for the World Health Organization, 2006), Appendix D.
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Cape Town; Kampala: David Philip; Fountain Publishers, 1996).
See Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover, eds., Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
Suki Ali, Kelly Coate, and Wangui wa Goro, eds., Global Feminist Politics: Identities in a Changing World (London: Routledge, 2000), 13–14.
See, inter alia, Robert H. Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Mark Findlay, The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships in Context (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
Jonathan Glennie, The Trouble with Aid: Why Less Could Mean More for Africa (London: Zed Books, in association with International African Institute, Royal African Society, and the Social Science Research Council, 2008);
Misha Glenny, McMafia: Seriously Organized Crime (London: Vintage Books, 2009);
Caroline Thomas and Peter Wilkin, Globalization, Human Security, and the African Experience, Critical Security Studies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998).
Jean Grugel and Hout Wil, Regionalismacross the North-South Divide: State Strategies and Globalization, European Political Science Series (New York: Routledge, 1999);
Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001);
R. J. Holton, Globalization and the Nation-State, 2nd edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Geoffrey Garrett, “The Causes of Globalization,” Comparative Political Studies 33, no. 6–7 (2000): 941–91.
Chris Simms, Mike Rowson, and Siobhan Peattie, “The Bitterest Pill of All: The Collapse of Africa’s Health Systems,” (London: Save the Children Fund (UK), 2001; An Eldis Document, http://www.eldis.org/assets/Docs/29246.html, accessed July 31, 2011).
Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles: University of California, 1999). See also
Graham Scambler, Health and Social Change: A Critical Theory, ed. Tim May (Buckingham and Philadelphia: The Open University Press, 2002). 86ff.
Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (New York: Hyperion, 2000).
Lucy Gilson, “Trust and the Development of Health Care as a Social Institution,” Social Science & Medicine 56 (2003): 1464.
John J. Hall and Richard Taylor, “Health for All Beyond 2000: The Demise of the Alma-Ata Declaration and Primary Health Care in Developing Countries,” Medical Journal of Australia 178 (2003): 17–20.
Marcos Cueto, “The Origins of Primary Health Care and Selective Primary Health Care,” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 11 (2004): 1864–74;
S. Macfarlane, M. Racelis, and F. Muli-Musiime, “Public Health in Developing Countries,” Lancet 356, no. 9232 (2000): 843.
Marcos Cueto, “The Origins of Primary Health Care and Selective Primary Health Care,” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 11 (2004): 1864–74;
S. Macfarlane, M. Racelis, and F. Muli-Musiime, “Public Health in Developing Countries,” Lancet 356, no. 9232 (2000): 843.
World Bank, World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg, Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).
C. Craig, D. Eby, and J. Whittington, “Care Coordination Model: Better Care at Lower Cost for People with Multiple Health and Social Needs,” (Cambridge, MA: Institute for Healthcare Improvement, 2011).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1998), 80.
Mark A. Smith, “Sap Opens Road for Hana and Big Data at Sapphire Now,” in Information Management Blogs, May 27, 2011, http://www.information-management.com/blogs/big_data_analytics_business_intelligence_SAP-10020453–1.htm1, accessed July 12, 2011.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
Robert Chambers and G. R. Conway, Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century, DP 296 (Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1991);
I. Scoones, Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A framework for Analysis, WP 72 (Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1998).
Charles Elliot, Locating the Energy for Change: An Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry (Winnipeg: International Institute for Sustainable Development, 1999).
Nan Lin, Karen Cook, and Ronald S. Burt, Social Capital: Theory and Research (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2001);
Corwin Smidt, ed., Religion as Social Capital: Producing the Common Good (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2003).
Harro Albrecht, “Rudolf Virchow,” Die Zeit, November 12, 2009. Available at http://www.zeit.de/2009/47/Vorbilder-Virchow, accessed June 29, 2011; our translations, original citations in German are: “Die medizinische Wissenschaft is in ihrem innersten Kern und Wesen eine social Wissenschaft” and “Die Politik sei weiter nichts ‘als Medicin im Grossen.”
Cited in Richard Hofrichter, ed. Health and Social Justice: Politics, Ideology, and Inequity in the Distribution of Disease (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass [John Wiley & Sons], 2003), 6.
Fabienne Peter, “Health Equity and Social Justice,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 18, no. 2 (2001): 159–70.
EQUINET Steering Committee, “Equity in Health in Southern Africa: Turning Values into Practice” (Harare, Zimbabwe: Regional Network for Equity in Health in Southern Africa, 2000), 2.
See James R. Cochrane, “‘Fire from Above, Fire from Below’: Health, Justice and the Persistence of the Sacred,” Theoria 116 (2008): 67; also
James R. Cochrane, “Health and the Uses of Religion: Recovering the Political Proper?” in Development and Politics from Below: Exploring Religious Spaces in the African State, ed. Barbara Bompani and Maria Frahm-Aarp (London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010).
One thing most religious leaders from various traditions around the world agree on is this maxim; see Nancy Hodes and Michael Hays, eds., The United Nations and the World’s Religions: Prospects for a Global Ethic (Cambridge, MA: Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, 1995);
Patricia M. Mische and Melissa Merkling, eds., Toward a Global Civilization? The Contribution of Religions (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 330.
Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ; Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Alexander Bird, Thomas Kuhn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., Foundations of the Unity of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1972).
Raj Bophal, “Paradigms in Epidemiology Textbooks: In the Footsteps of Thomas Kuhn,” American journal of Public Health 89, no. 8 (1999): 1162.
Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 365. Emphasis in the original.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Gary R. Gunderson and James R. Cochrane
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gunderson, G.R., Cochrane, J.R. (2012). The Challenge of Systems. In: Religion and the Health of the Public. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015259_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015259_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-34152-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01525-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)