engleski

Medical Pluralism in Post-socialist Croatia - from Ethnography to Activism

The postsocialist period in Croatia started in the 1990ies and, among other changes, caused significant changes in the biomedical health care system, which became less state funded and more market oriented and, thus, more expensive to the patients. Simultaneously, and maybe partly because of this, the non-biomedical systems became more prominent. In this presentation I will outline my PhD research, the main topic of which was medical pluralism in postsocialist Croatia. The research dealt with interrelatedness and co-existence of biomedical and non-biomedical systems in the city of Zagreb. I wanted to answer the following questions: why is an increasing number of people turning to complementary and alternative medicine, is this the consequence of changes in health care system and its commodification, are the new age trends partly responsible for it, did it happen also because of the large migrations from rural parts to Zagreb and the subsequent change in population structure, etc.? As an ethnographer, I was faced with moving stories of loss and trauma (stories of war refugees, patients with PTSS, disabled people), which made me re-examine my position of an observer, interpreter, analyst. Furthermore, as an ethnologist educated in the tradition of Eastern European 'old ethnology', I 'inherited' the discipline’s attitude towards traditional concepts of health and illness as structured around the term ‘folk medicine’. Publications on these topics were descriptive ethnographies which mostly neglected the biological, social, political, ideological, economic aspects of healing. This paper aims at emphasizing the need to 'infest' the descriptive ethnographies on health and illness with medical anthropological theories. Our unique possibility, as ethnologists and anthropologists, to understand and interpret other cultural norms and to apply this to this very sensitive field full of emotions, beliefs, metaphors and meanings may, in the case of applied medical anthropology, suggest a possible shift towards activism.

medical pluralism, post-socialism

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