Waldorf education, an independent alternative to public schooling, aims to produce holistically healthy graduates in a formulation that rejects the conventional distinction between education and health. Also striving to bridge that divide, this article characterizes the pedagogically salutogenic techniques Waldorf teachers use in pre‐kindergarten (pre‐K) and lower grade classes and explicates the ethnomedical understandings underlying them. Waldorf teachers position children as budding participants in a unified field of spiritual and other forces, prioritizing whole‐child activities that keep these forces healthfully motile. Their work entails a critique not only of mainstream public schooling's ostensibly pathogenic “head‐to‐head” focus, but also of the biomedical approach to pediatric health. My analysis of this conjoined critique takes into account the cultural, structural, and existential realities within which Waldorf education's salutary pedagogy is daily framed and fabricated. Further, it explores the implications for anthropology of attending to movement as a key feature of healthful human experience.
Medical travel is an inherently cross-cultural exercise. But what, exactly, does culture entail? How and where does it make its mark? This chapter demonstrates that we are all cultural beings, and that culture (biomedical culture included) is processual and porous rather than a static, self-contained, ethnically-anchored entity. The chapter then examines the various ways in which culture informs diverse dimensions of medical travel, including not only marketing, facilitation, and health services delivery, but also care seeking. Indeed, culture underwrites diverse health-related demand-side desires themselves, and motivates many of the varied secondary outcomes that patients, and families, strive for when undertaking medical travel. Culture also has important supply-side ramifications, as for subjective self-experience and local self-definition. As this chapter shows, an in-depth understanding of culture must be applied if we are to achieve full, fine-grained knowledge of medical travel’s varied forms, diverse purposes, and sundry ramifications.
Increasing HIV testing is a necessary step toward control of the disease. Many experts suggest routinely offering HIV testing to specific population segments. We explore provider discourse regarding an HIV test implementation project with the aim of illuminating a structurally emergent clinician strategy for promoting testing and the socio-cultural factors underlying it. Twenty US Veterans Affairs Healthcare System clinical care providers were interviewed. Using standard anthropological text analysis techniques, themes, their relationships, and the significance of these for increasing appropriately targeted HIV test offers were established. Presenting the HIV test offer to their patients as if routine ('routinisation') supported providers' desire to do no harm by lessening the test's potential stigma. Offering the test helped providers maintain professional integrity: it empowered veterans to realise access to care and fit with providers' sense of honour and duty. Routinising HIV testing also helped providers to manage scarce time effectively. Findings can be leveraged to support routine screening's successful roll-out. The carefully managed introduction of routine HIV test offering policies will formalise and legitimise productive strategies of destigmatisation already being enacted by some front-line providers. The fact that routinisation strategies are in use although HIV testing is not actually routine attests to the potential power routinisation has to reduce HIV's stigma, increase HIV test uptake, and thereby improve access to care. What I've learned about tough questions is: The more routine you make them, the easier it is to get the questions answered, the less destructive it is to the relationship and that's the sort of paradigm I've come to believe in and will use now into the future. (Marvin K, MD).
