Worlds of Health

Reed, K. Worlds of Health: Exploring the Health Choices of British Asian Mothers . Wesport, Connecticut : Praeger , 2003 . £39.99 (hbk) xii + 191pp . ISBN 0-89789-914-8 . This is an ambitious book, which attempts to address gaps in research and knowledge through synthesising theoretical developments in the areas of ethnicity and identity, with empirical research focused on the issue of the health choices of British Asian mothers in a Midlands city in the UK. Importantly, criticising existing health and ethnicity research for its over-reliance on epidemiological studies, on explaining cultural differences rather than health inequalities, its lack of focus on issues of gender, generation and ethnicity through qualitative exploration, this book aims to depart from deterministic models of research on ethnicity and health. Through focusing on a group with local and global connections, the author argues for ‘a globally located and context specific approach’ and, by drawing on important existing writing, outlines a theoretical framework for enabling this to take place. This is a valuable contribution of the book. The author provides an important discussion and critique of the ways in which the explanatory frameworks of much health research serve to give primacy to ethnic/racial groups in an ethnically-reductive approach while obscuring other major divisions such as class, gender and generation among others, something that she herself seeks to foreground. Thus, seeing ethnicity and culture in their dynamic and fluid form as part of a complex of influences on health choices, and criticising research on women's health for inadequately addressing health choices of black and minority ethnic women, the author argues for ‘a broader link between health choice, ethnicity, gender, generation and globalisation’ (p. 8). Through 30 interviews with a diverse group of Asian women/mothers (born or living in Britain since the age of five), the study explores women's health choices through their position as mediators of family health, a role also highlighted by other research on women's health choices. It importantly disrupts the formulation of second-generation South Asians as caught between two cultures, so popular in 1970s and 1980s sociology and still evident in ethnicity and health research. Couching identities as fluid and dynamic, and health choices as similarly so, thus enables the author to make an exploration of the use of plural systems of healthcare by diasporic groups in Britain. The notions of context and syncrecy are central to the book and indeed it is the influence of both of these that is at its heart. The author transports the notion of syncretic/hybrid identities developed by a range of writers who have been influential in shaping our thinking about the way identities and cultures of diasporic groups are constructed, into the context of health, i.e. syncrecy (crossovers and tensions) in the use and mix of remedies deployed by South Asian women and the role of context in these choices. This leads the author to argue that health choices necessarily have to be viewed as ‘processual’ and changing according to context (ethnicity/culture, class, access to health services, work, location in family and so on) and time (p. 15). The findings of the book are perhaps unsurprising – that Asian women's use of remedies depends on their access to a plurality of medicines and is shaped by a series of influences: the type of illness – non-Western medicine for general illness and Western medicine for serious illness; the ways in which family, generation and lifecourse shape the use of Western and non-Western remedies; women's role within the family in shaping use of syncretic remedies; ways in which women's syncretic location in Britain (through a discussion of religion, community and identity) shapes the use of syncretic remedies; influence of the local (Leicester) and the global (South Asia) in the use of health product purchases and health-care in South Asia; concluding that women's position as British Asians and members of a diaspora gives them increasing access to a plurality of health products which they utilise, in a wider context where the use of non-biomedical health systems and remedies are on the increase. This book is an important contribution to research and knowledge on the intersections of ethnicity, identity and health in a global context and the role of personal, social and structural influences on health choices. It importantly draws on writing on identity, on culture and diaspora studies to explore concepts of health and illness and the influences shaping everyday decisions individuals make about their own and their family's health. In aiming to depart from existing health research, this book manages to move forward our thinking in this area, as well as giving centrality to the voices and experiences of South Asian women

Aesthetics · Context (archaeology) · Ethnic group · Geography · Health equity · Identity (music) · Public health · Qualitative research · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Health disparities and outcomes · Medicine · Obesity and Health Practices · Social Policy and Reform Studies