An Ethnography of Stress The Social Determinants of Health in Aboriginal Australia

by Burbank, Victoria Katherine

• ISBN13: 9781137346162
• ISBN10: 1137346167
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-07-25
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Health inequality is a global issue. This book examines the problem through an in-depth look at a remote Australian Aboriginal community characterized by a degree of premature morbidity and mortality similar to that in other disadvantaged populations. Its synthesis of cognitive anthropology with frameworks drawn from epidemiology, evolutionary theory, and social, psychological and biological sciences illuminates the actions, emotions, and stresses of daily life. While this analysis implicates structures and processes of inequality in the genesis of ill health, its focus remains on the people who suffer, grieve, and live with the dilemmas of an intercultural life.

Author Biography

Victoria Katherine Burbank is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of Aboriginal Adolescence: Maidenhood in an Australian Community and Fighting Women: Anger and Aggression in Aboriginal Australia.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Using Social Determinants of Health, Using Ethnography
2. At Numbulwar: Blackfellas and Whitefellas
3. Life History and Real Life: Fetal Origins of Disease, Ethnography, and History
4. Feeling Bad: Everyday Stress
5. Identity
6. Selves and Others
7. Conclusion: A Tentative Answer to a Fundamental Epidemiological Question