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:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
B. Mansfield
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
B. Mansfield
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