Waiting for Care and Community Organizing for Serious Health-Related Suffering in Kerala, India

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4564402
AutoresDevi Vijay (0000-0003-0670-8838, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta Kolkata, India, autor correspondente), Gitte H Koksvik (0000-0003-1233-4887, Department of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Trondheim, Norway)
Ano2024
Volume43
Fascículo4
Páginas338-352
Data de publicação2024-05-18
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoMedical Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0145-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-5882
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01459740.2024.2351066
PMID38753501
OpenAlexW4396977517
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas56

We explore the temporalities that shape and alleviate serious health-related suffering among those with chronic and terminal conditions in Kerala, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2019, we examine the entanglements between waiting for care within dominant institutions and the community organizing that palliates this waiting. Specifically, people navigate multiple medical institutions, experience loneliness and abandonment, loss of autonomy, and delays and denials of recognition as they wait for care. Community palliative care organizations offering free, routine, home-based care provide samadhanam (peace of mind) and swatantrayam (self-determination) in lifeworlds mired with chronic waiting. We document how community care sustains an alternative politics of shared time, untethered from marketized notions of efficiency and productivity toward profits. In so doing, we cast in high relief community healthcare imaginaries that alleviate serious health-related suffering and reconfigure Global North-centric perspectives

Abandonment (legal · Autonomy · Economic growth · Ethnography · Health care · Loneliness · Palliative care · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Public relations · Sociology · Temporalities · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Social and Economic Development in India · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies