City and cosmology
Genetics, health, and urban living in Dubai
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2171492 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aaron Parkhurst (0000-0002-0762-0929, Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL), London, United Kingdom, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 68-84 |
| Publication date | 2018-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anthropology and Medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1364-8470 • E-ISSN: 1469-2910 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13648470.2017.1398815 |
| PMID | 29533094 |
| OpenAlex | W2791799100 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 31 |
In light of increasingly high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity among citizens of the Arabian Gulf, popular health discourse in the region has emphasised the emergent Arab genome as the primary etiological basis of major health conditions. However, after many years of public dissemination of genomic knowledge in the region, and widespread acceptance of this knowledge among Gulf Arab citizens, the rates of chronic illness continue to increase. This paper briefly explores the clash between indigenous Islamic knowledge systems and biomedical knowledge systems imported into the United Arab Emirates. It presents vignettes collected from interviews and participant observation in Dubai as part of nearly four years of ethnographic research, completed as part of the author's doctoral work on 'Anxiety and Identity in Southeast Arabia'. Rather than radically informing health seeking behaviours among many UAE citizens, the emphasis on the 'Arab Genome' has instead reconfirmed the authority of Bedouin cosmological understandings of disease, reshaping the language that people use to engage with their bodies and their health. Local cosmology remains a powerful discursive element that often operates in contention, in sometimes powerfully subtle ways, with novel health initiative regimes. For many people in the region, genomic information, as it is often discussed and propagated in the UAE, shares an intimate relationship with ideas of fate and national identity, and sometimes serves to mitigate the increasingly uncertain terms of engagement that people share between the body, their health, and rapidly changing urban landscapes
Aesthetics · Biology · Ethnography · Geography · Identity (music · Indigenous · Islam · Political science · Public health · Public relations · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Medicine · Nursing · Race, Genetics, and Society · Ecology
Consanguineous Marriages in the United Arab Emirates
Purity and Danger
The Golden Bough
In the Time of Oil
Trends over 5 Decades in U.S. Occupation-Related Physical Activity and Their Associations with Obesity
Associations between exposure to takeaway food outlets, takeaway food consumption, and body weight in Cambridgeshire, UK
Embodiment and experience
We Have Never Been Human
Pathologies of Power
Race and Genetics
Understanding the relationship between food environments, deprivation and childhood overweight and obesity
Will genetic testing for predisposition for disease result in fatalism? A qualitative study of parents responses to neonatal screening for familial hypercholesterolaemia
Coca-colonization of diets in the Yucatan
Science as Culture, Cultures of Science
Mediterranean Countrymen. Essays in the Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean
The Mindful Body
Islam, Fatalism, and Medical Intervention
Taking Action on Health Inequities
Lumpen Abuse
When the state and your kidneys fail
Speaking through Diabetes
SSSR Presidential Address Rain Dances in the Dry Season
Fatness and the Maternal Body
Comprehending the Body in the Era of the Epigenome
Arranging marriage; negotiating risk
Old diseases and contemporary crisis. Inherited blood disorders in the Sultanate of Oman
The Epigenome and Nature/Nurture Reunification
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |