Brigit Obrist
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 110885 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Brigit Obrist |
| PRENOMES | Brigit |
| SOBRENOME | Obrist |
| ASSINATURA | OBRIST B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7576-1291 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 21 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 91 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2003 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Medical Anthropology in, of, for and with Africa
Current medical anthropology offers an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of how and why Africans engage with diverse forces that continue to influence their ways of practicing medic
Rethinking sociality and health through transfiguration
In this introductory article to the Special Section, we intend to literally bring sociality to (bodily) life and ask what medical anthropology might gain by using the lens of sociality for a better understanding of the phenomena it is concerned with. Conversely, we probe how the field of health and illness - including themes concerning embodiment, vulnerability, suffering, and death - might help to further spell out the notion of sociality both c…
Medical Anthropology in, of, for and with Africa
Medical anthropologists offer an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of how and why people in Africa engage with diverse forces influencing their ways of experiencing illness and practicing medicine in an unequal world. Expanding the research focus from healers to patients and, since 2000, to biomedicine and global health, they have deepened our understanding of the intricate, though not immediately visible networks of connecting, d…
Pratique d’Interdits Alimentaires
Social norms are depriving Agni communities of Bongouanou in central-eastern Côte d’Ivoire of certain foods adding to a state of food insecurity. Based on significant cases of food restrictions, this study analyzed nutritional practices that position individuals and groups in social normative frameworks. This work focused on institutional frameworks where health and food taboo aspects were most shared. This study aims to analyze the social imagin…
My wife, you are supposed to have a rest now
Men as sexual partners, fathers and household heads have a direct bearing on women's reproductive health. However, little is known about the influence of changing norms and values on men's role in ensuring women's health during pregnancy and childbirth. This study from rural south-eastern Tanzania explores men's and women's discussions on men's roles and responsibilities in prenatal care and links them to an analysis of norms and values at the ho…
Appropriating “Malaria
A continuing dilemma for medical and public health professionals is the apparent lack of fit between global and local knowledge systems and technologies. This is illustrated in relationship to malaria, with implications in the management of the disease. Ethnographic research was conducted from 2003-2005 in urban Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, on community understandings of malaria and the relationship of this to its prevention and control. Malaria is re…
Building multi‐layered resilience in a malaria control programme in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
This study applied the multi‐layered social resilience framework in the context of an urban malaria control programme by using a qualitative approach. It was found that exchange between and within administrative levels supported resilience‐building processes in terms of mosquito breeding site elimination. ‘Reactive’ and ‘proactive’ capacities were successfully built among programme staff. However, more potential could be tapped among local leader…
Multi‐layered social resilience
Research on sustainable development tends to focus on risk and vulnerability. This article argues for a shift of emphasis from vulnerability to resilience. It develops a Multi‐layered social resilience framework emphasising the interactions between enabling factors and capacities operating at different levels of society. Enabling factors help to master threats by facilitating access to and transformation of capitals. Capacities lead social actors…
Livelihood, malaria and resilience
In various parts of Sub‐Saharan Africa, malaria is endemic in areas where rain‐fed agriculture implies seasonal mobility from villages to paddy fields. Contributing to the small but growing literature on livelihood and malaria, this article examines the ways in which social actors mobilise, combine and transform capitals on the household and community levels to obtain malaria treatment. It emphasises the structuring force of cultural capital and …
Improving Environmental Sanitation, Health, and Well-Being
The moment of sale
Beyond home care without active treatment, the first step of home-based management of malaria (HMM) is the health provider-customer interactions that often lead to the purchase of drugs or herbs to treat symptoms. In Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, the quality and content of such interactions in pharmacies where antimalarials are sold officially, with illegal drug vendors and with herbal medicine sellers, vary considerably. Commercial encounters associat…
Obstacles to prompt and effective malaria treatment lead to low community-coverage in two rural districts of Tanzania
A clear preference for modern medicine was reflected in the frequent use of antimalarials. Yet, quality of case-management was far from satisfactory as was the functioning of the exemption mechanism for the main risk group. Private drug retailers played a central role by complementing existing formal health services in delivering antimalarial treatment. Health system factors like these need to be tackled urgently in order to translate the high ef…
Malaria treatment in the retail sector
The quality of malaria case-management in the retail sector is not satisfactory. Drug stores should be supported and empowered to provide correct malaria-treatment with drugs they are allowed to dispense. At the same time, the role of general shops as first contact points for malaria patients needs to be re-considered. Interventions to improve availability of ACTs in the retail sector are urgently required within the given legal framework
Stress as an idiom for resilience
Most research on migrants examines what makes them ill. Inspired by Antonovsky's salutogenic approach, this study shifts the perspective and asks why migrants stay healthy. At the centre of interest are sub-Saharan Africans living in Switzerland who consider themselves and/or are considered by others as mastering problems affecting their health. The mixed Swiss-African research team explored meanings of health and resilience in 20 case studies in…
Access to Health Care in Contexts of Livelihood Insecurity
The Policy Forum allows health policy makers around the world to discuss challenges
Interconnected Slums
Integrating Local and Biomedical Knowledge and Communication
This study examines social and cultural dimensions of the Kilombero Treated Net (KINET) project, a large-scale social marketing program of insecticide treated nets for malaria control in two rural districts in Southern Tanzania from 1996 to 2000. Drawing on a model distinguishing between indigenous and exogenous components of knowledge and communication, it uses a range of ethnographic methods to investigate the ?ow of information between the pro…
Medicalization and morality in a weak state
Inspired by Foucault, many studies have examined the medicalization of everyday life in Western societies. This paper reconsiders potentials and limitations of this concept in an African city. Grounded in ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it concentrates on cleanliness, health and water in a lower middle-class neighbourhood. The findings show that women are familiar with professional health development discourses emphasizing clean…
Urban health in daily practice
Health is the core value and ultimate goal of health development, yet we know very little about health conceptions in everyday life. Inspired by investigations into lay health concepts in Europe, our study explores experiences and meanings of health in a strikingly different context, namely, in a low-income neighbourhood of an African city. Grounded in ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, we introduce the concept of 'health practice' and exami…
Engaging anthropology in urban health research
Urbanisation remains a challenge in the new millennium and will continue to have important implications for human health. This leads to lively debates in the field of international health, but with minimal engagement of anthropology. To stimulate active involvement, our paper highlights main issues addressed in this special issue and maps directions for future research. Our collection of papers addresses hot topics in urban health research, rangi…
Health anthropology and urban health research
We live in a rapidly urbanising world. According to the 2001 statistics of the United Nations,a the proportion of urban dwellers rose from 30% in 1950 to 47% in 2000 and will probably attain 60% in 2030. Almost 70% of these urban dwellers live in cities of developing regions. At the current rates of urbanisation, the number of city dwellers in the world will equal that of their rural counterparts by 2007. In the late 1980s, researchers became inc…
Multi‐layered social resilience
Research on sustainable development tends to focus on risk and vulnerability. This article argues for a shift of emphasis from vulnerability to resilience. It develops a Multi‐layered social resilience framework emphasising the interactions between enabling factors and capacities operating at different levels of society. Enabling factors help to master threats by facilitating access to and transformation of capitals. Capacities lead social actors…
The moment of sale
Beyond home care without active treatment, the first step of home-based management of malaria (HMM) is the health provider-customer interactions that often lead to the purchase of drugs or herbs to treat symptoms. In Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, the quality and content of such interactions in pharmacies where antimalarials are sold officially, with illegal drug vendors and with herbal medicine sellers, vary considerably. Commercial encounters associat…
Appropriating “Malaria
A continuing dilemma for medical and public health professionals is the apparent lack of fit between global and local knowledge systems and technologies. This is illustrated in relationship to malaria, with implications in the management of the disease. Ethnographic research was conducted from 2003-2005 in urban Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, on community understandings of malaria and the relationship of this to its prevention and control. Malaria is re…
Urban health in daily practice
Health is the core value and ultimate goal of health development, yet we know very little about health conceptions in everyday life. Inspired by investigations into lay health concepts in Europe, our study explores experiences and meanings of health in a strikingly different context, namely, in a low-income neighbourhood of an African city. Grounded in ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, we introduce the concept of 'health practice' and exami…
My wife, you are supposed to have a rest now
Men as sexual partners, fathers and household heads have a direct bearing on women's reproductive health. However, little is known about the influence of changing norms and values on men's role in ensuring women's health during pregnancy and childbirth. This study from rural south-eastern Tanzania explores men's and women's discussions on men's roles and responsibilities in prenatal care and links them to an analysis of norms and values at the ho…
Livelihood, malaria and resilience
In various parts of Sub‐Saharan Africa, malaria is endemic in areas where rain‐fed agriculture implies seasonal mobility from villages to paddy fields. Contributing to the small but growing literature on livelihood and malaria, this article examines the ways in which social actors mobilise, combine and transform capitals on the household and community levels to obtain malaria treatment. It emphasises the structuring force of cultural capital and …
Health anthropology and urban health research
We live in a rapidly urbanising world. According to the 2001 statistics of the United Nations,a the proportion of urban dwellers rose from 30% in 1950 to 47% in 2000 and will probably attain 60% in 2030. Almost 70% of these urban dwellers live in cities of developing regions. At the current rates of urbanisation, the number of city dwellers in the world will equal that of their rural counterparts by 2007. In the late 1980s, researchers became inc…
Stress as an idiom for resilience
Most research on migrants examines what makes them ill. Inspired by Antonovsky's salutogenic approach, this study shifts the perspective and asks why migrants stay healthy. At the centre of interest are sub-Saharan Africans living in Switzerland who consider themselves and/or are considered by others as mastering problems affecting their health. The mixed Swiss-African research team explored meanings of health and resilience in 20 case studies in…
Medicalization and morality in a weak state
Inspired by Foucault, many studies have examined the medicalization of everyday life in Western societies. This paper reconsiders potentials and limitations of this concept in an African city. Grounded in ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it concentrates on cleanliness, health and water in a lower middle-class neighbourhood. The findings show that women are familiar with professional health development discourses emphasizing clean…
Rethinking sociality and health through transfiguration
In this introductory article to the Special Section, we intend to literally bring sociality to (bodily) life and ask what medical anthropology might gain by using the lens of sociality for a better understanding of the phenomena it is concerned with. Conversely, we probe how the field of health and illness - including themes concerning embodiment, vulnerability, suffering, and death - might help to further spell out the notion of sociality both c…
Medical Anthropology in, of, for and with Africa
Medical anthropologists offer an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of how and why people in Africa engage with diverse forces influencing their ways of experiencing illness and practicing medicine in an unequal world. Expanding the research focus from healers to patients and, since 2000, to biomedicine and global health, they have deepened our understanding of the intricate, though not immediately visible networks of connecting, d…
Building multi‐layered resilience in a malaria control programme in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
This study applied the multi‐layered social resilience framework in the context of an urban malaria control programme by using a qualitative approach. It was found that exchange between and within administrative levels supported resilience‐building processes in terms of mosquito breeding site elimination. ‘Reactive’ and ‘proactive’ capacities were successfully built among programme staff. However, more potential could be tapped among local leader…
Interconnected Slums
Urban health in daily practice
Health is the core value and ultimate goal of health development, yet we know very little about health conceptions in everyday life. Inspired by investigations into lay health concepts in Europe, our study explores experiences and meanings of health in a strikingly different context, namely, in a low-income neighbourhood of an African city. Grounded in ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, we introduce the concept of 'health practice' and exami…
Engaging anthropology in urban health research
Urbanisation remains a challenge in the new millennium and will continue to have important implications for human health. This leads to lively debates in the field of international health, but with minimal engagement of anthropology. To stimulate active involvement, our paper highlights main issues addressed in this special issue and maps directions for future research. Our collection of papers addresses hot topics in urban health research, rangi…
Health anthropology and urban health research
We live in a rapidly urbanising world. According to the 2001 statistics of the United Nations,a the proportion of urban dwellers rose from 30% in 1950 to 47% in 2000 and will probably attain 60% in 2030. Almost 70% of these urban dwellers live in cities of developing regions. At the current rates of urbanisation, the number of city dwellers in the world will equal that of their rural counterparts by 2007. In the late 1980s, researchers became inc…
Medicalization and morality in a weak state
Inspired by Foucault, many studies have examined the medicalization of everyday life in Western societies. This paper reconsiders potentials and limitations of this concept in an African city. Grounded in ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it concentrates on cleanliness, health and water in a lower middle-class neighbourhood. The findings show that women are familiar with professional health development discourses emphasizing clean…
Integrating Local and Biomedical Knowledge and Communication
This study examines social and cultural dimensions of the Kilombero Treated Net (KINET) project, a large-scale social marketing program of insecticide treated nets for malaria control in two rural districts in Southern Tanzania from 1996 to 2000. Drawing on a model distinguishing between indigenous and exogenous components of knowledge and communication, it uses a range of ethnographic methods to investigate the ?ow of information between the pro…
Interconnected Slums
Access to Health Care in Contexts of Livelihood Insecurity
The Policy Forum allows health policy makers around the world to discuss challenges
Obstacles to prompt and effective malaria treatment lead to low community-coverage in two rural districts of Tanzania
A clear preference for modern medicine was reflected in the frequent use of antimalarials. Yet, quality of case-management was far from satisfactory as was the functioning of the exemption mechanism for the main risk group. Private drug retailers played a central role by complementing existing formal health services in delivering antimalarial treatment. Health system factors like these need to be tackled urgently in order to translate the high ef…
Malaria treatment in the retail sector
The quality of malaria case-management in the retail sector is not satisfactory. Drug stores should be supported and empowered to provide correct malaria-treatment with drugs they are allowed to dispense. At the same time, the role of general shops as first contact points for malaria patients needs to be re-considered. Interventions to improve availability of ACTs in the retail sector are urgently required within the given legal framework
Stress as an idiom for resilience
Most research on migrants examines what makes them ill. Inspired by Antonovsky's salutogenic approach, this study shifts the perspective and asks why migrants stay healthy. At the centre of interest are sub-Saharan Africans living in Switzerland who consider themselves and/or are considered by others as mastering problems affecting their health. The mixed Swiss-African research team explored meanings of health and resilience in 20 case studies in…
Improving Environmental Sanitation, Health, and Well-Being
The moment of sale
Beyond home care without active treatment, the first step of home-based management of malaria (HMM) is the health provider-customer interactions that often lead to the purchase of drugs or herbs to treat symptoms. In Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, the quality and content of such interactions in pharmacies where antimalarials are sold officially, with illegal drug vendors and with herbal medicine sellers, vary considerably. Commercial encounters associat…
Building multi‐layered resilience in a malaria control programme in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
This study applied the multi‐layered social resilience framework in the context of an urban malaria control programme by using a qualitative approach. It was found that exchange between and within administrative levels supported resilience‐building processes in terms of mosquito breeding site elimination. ‘Reactive’ and ‘proactive’ capacities were successfully built among programme staff. However, more potential could be tapped among local leader…
Multi‐layered social resilience
Research on sustainable development tends to focus on risk and vulnerability. This article argues for a shift of emphasis from vulnerability to resilience. It develops a Multi‐layered social resilience framework emphasising the interactions between enabling factors and capacities operating at different levels of society. Enabling factors help to master threats by facilitating access to and transformation of capitals. Capacities lead social actors…
Livelihood, malaria and resilience
In various parts of Sub‐Saharan Africa, malaria is endemic in areas where rain‐fed agriculture implies seasonal mobility from villages to paddy fields. Contributing to the small but growing literature on livelihood and malaria, this article examines the ways in which social actors mobilise, combine and transform capitals on the household and community levels to obtain malaria treatment. It emphasises the structuring force of cultural capital and …
Appropriating “Malaria
A continuing dilemma for medical and public health professionals is the apparent lack of fit between global and local knowledge systems and technologies. This is illustrated in relationship to malaria, with implications in the management of the disease. Ethnographic research was conducted from 2003-2005 in urban Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, on community understandings of malaria and the relationship of this to its prevention and control. Malaria is re…
My wife, you are supposed to have a rest now
Men as sexual partners, fathers and household heads have a direct bearing on women's reproductive health. However, little is known about the influence of changing norms and values on men's role in ensuring women's health during pregnancy and childbirth. This study from rural south-eastern Tanzania explores men's and women's discussions on men's roles and responsibilities in prenatal care and links them to an analysis of norms and values at the ho…
Pratique d’Interdits Alimentaires
Social norms are depriving Agni communities of Bongouanou in central-eastern Côte d’Ivoire of certain foods adding to a state of food insecurity. Based on significant cases of food restrictions, this study analyzed nutritional practices that position individuals and groups in social normative frameworks. This work focused on institutional frameworks where health and food taboo aspects were most shared. This study aims to analyze the social imagin…
Rethinking sociality and health through transfiguration
In this introductory article to the Special Section, we intend to literally bring sociality to (bodily) life and ask what medical anthropology might gain by using the lens of sociality for a better understanding of the phenomena it is concerned with. Conversely, we probe how the field of health and illness - including themes concerning embodiment, vulnerability, suffering, and death - might help to further spell out the notion of sociality both c…
Medical Anthropology in, of, for and with Africa
Medical anthropologists offer an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of how and why people in Africa engage with diverse forces influencing their ways of experiencing illness and practicing medicine in an unequal world. Expanding the research focus from healers to patients and, since 2000, to biomedicine and global health, they have deepened our understanding of the intricate, though not immediately visible networks of connecting, d…
Medical Anthropology in, of, for and with Africa
Current medical anthropology offers an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of how and why Africans engage with diverse forces that continue to influence their ways of practicing medic
Sociology (16 obras) · Political science (11 obras) · Geography (10 obras) · Medicine (10 obras) · Socioeconomics (9 obras) · Psychology (7 obras) · Tanzania (7 obras) · Anthropology (6 obras) · Economic growth (6 obras) · Malaria (6 obras)