Health as a Nature — Society Question

Health as a Nature — Society Question
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健康是一种自然——社会问题

DOI:
10.1068/a40366
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发表时间:
2008
期刊:
Environment and Planning A
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
B. Mansfield
B. Mansfield
中科院分区:
--
文献类型:
--
作者:
B. Mansfield

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对健康,包括(也许特别是)环境和健康的兴趣正在增加。作为千年之交的中心议题之一,对健康的兴趣似乎也在地理领域扩大。(One这方面的一点证据是最近在美国刊登广告的“健康”或“健康与环境”学术职位的数量。作为一个对自然和社会关系有着长期兴趣的地理学家,我发现这些发展非常有趣。一方面,我对日益重视健康和环境领域所带来的活力和机会感到兴奋。我一直在重新调整我自己的研究议程,以健康为主题,试图将我更成熟的专业领域(环境的政治经济学)的一些见解扩展到与健康和福祉有关的问题。另一方面,当我开始这项研究,并在现有的医学和健康地理学的奖学金中寻找方向时,我一直感到惊讶的是,缺乏对“自然”问题的关注,以及“它”如何融入我们对健康和疾病的概念。过去20年左右关于自然、社会关系的批判性学术研究如何更好地为关于健康的地理学术研究提供信息(作为研究对象的“健康”是否与"环境“明确相关)?鉴于我的知识背景,对我来说,健康本质上是一种自然与社会的关系这一观点是显而易见的:健康不仅涉及人与“环境”之间的相互作用,而且涉及人体的生理学,即使它不能被简化为生理身体。身体的健康只能是生物物理和社会的,对吗?那么,健康难道不应该被视为一种“生物社会”过程和做法吗?但不知何故,目前关于健康的学术研究中缺少这种“生物社会”的意义。公认的“医疗地理学”研究疾病的空间传播和获得保健等现象。这种方法通常从健康的生物医学概念出发,其中身体和疾病是生物现象的根源。最近的“健康地理学”方法否定了这种对健康和疾病的生物学理解,该方法可追溯到1990年代初,审查了健康与地点之间的关系,包括对地点的体验。这种学术研究煞费苦心地用社会身体取代生物身体(Kearns,1993; Kearns and Moon,2002)。从那时起,一些学者(在健康地理学和相关领域)试图带回物质身体(帕尔,2002年;彼得森,2007年),但即使是这种奖学金更倾向于关于身体的物质经验和空间性的问题,而不是关于生物学和健康的问题。因此,它避免了直接处理混乱的“自然问题”,也就是说,我们如何避免生物决定论或自然决定论。|“我们有关于自然独立性的概念,而不会陷入否认生物体存在和意义的陷阱吗?这一“自然问题”激发了地理学中大量关于“社会自然”的文献(Braun和Castree,1998年; Castree和Braun,2001年),它是从科学研究(Haraway,1991年; Latour,1993年)到环境史(Cronon,1995年; Merchant,1980年)等领域的基本内容。然而,那些对自然、社会关系感兴趣的人和那些对健康和福祉感兴趣的人之间几乎没有互动。Annemarie Mol是将这些结合在一起的学者之一,她在她的《身体的多重性》(2002)一书中将生物学视为颁布的东西,《环境与规划A》2008年,第40卷,第1015 ^ 1019页
Interest in health, including (perhaps especially) environment and health, is on the rise. One of the central topics of the turn of the millennium, interest in health seems to be expanding in geography as well. (One bit of evidence for this is the number of academic positions in `health' or `health and environment' that have been advertised recently in the US.) As a geographer with long interest in nature ^ society relations, I find these developments to be quite interesting. On the one hand, I find myself excited by the energy and opportunities opened up by increased attention to the area of health and environment. I have been reorienting my own research agenda toward the topic of health by trying to extend some of the insights from my more established àreas of expertise' (in political economy of the environment) to questions related to health and wellbeing. On the other hand, as I have been embarking on this research and looking for direction in the existing scholarship in medial and health geography, I have been continually surprised by the lack of attention to questions about `nature' and how `it' figures into our notions of health and disease. How might the past two decades or so of critical scholarship on nature ^ society relations better inform geographical scholarship on health (whether or not the `health' that is the object of study is explicitly tied to `the environment')? Given my intellectual background, to me the idea that health is inherently a nature ^ society relationship is obvious: not only does health involve interactions between people and `the environment', but health involves the physiology of the human body even as it cannot be reduced to that physiological body. The healthiness of the body cannot help but be biophysical and social, right? So mustn't health be conceptualized as a `biosocial' process and practice? But somehow missing from current scholarship on health is this sense of the `biosocial'. The well-established `medical geography' examines phenomena such as the spatial spread of disease and access to health care. This approach generally starts from a biomedical conceptualization of health, in which bodies and diseases are at root biological phenomena. This biological understanding of health and disease is rejected in the more recent `geographies of health' approach, which dates to the early 1990s and examines the relationship between health and place, including experience of place. This scholarship takes pains to replace the biological body with the social body (Kearns, 1993; Kearns and Moon, 2002). Since then, a number of scholars (in health geography and related fields) have tried to bring back the material body (Parr, 2002; Peterson, 2007), but even this scholarship tends more toward questions regarding material experience and spatiality of the body than those regarding biology and health. It thereby avoids directly addressing the messiness of the `nature question', that is, how do we avoid biological determinism or na|« ve notions regarding the independence of nature without falling into the trap of denying the existence and significance of the biological body? This `nature question' has animated a large literature in geography on `social nature' (Braun and Castree, 1998; Castree and Braun, 2001), and it is the basic stuff of fields from science studies (Haraway, 1991; Latour, 1993) to environmental history (Cronon, 1995; Merchant, 1980). Yet there is little interaction between those interested in nature ^ society relations and those interested in health and wellbeing. Among the scholars who do bring these together is Annemarie Mol, who in her book on The Body Multiple (2002) treats the biological as something that is enacted Commentary Environment and Planning A 2008, volume 40, pages 1015 ^ 1019