Non-Western Concepts on Cleanliness, Hygiene and Health in Transition

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This research aimed to examine the changing concepts of cleanliness, hygiene, health and body in non-Western societies, especially in the context of international public health development. This consisted of two steps : (1)examining social and cultural history of public health in Western as well as non-Western societies ; and(2)constructing historical and ethnographic descriptions on the matter in non-Western societies that our members of the research have studied so far.In 1999-2000, we examined several topics such as socio-cultural effects of waterworks in Europe, the institutionalization of public health and secularization of religiosity, public health and changing discourses of illness, Christian missions and the concepts of cleanliness and hygiene and so on.In 2000-2001, we tried to describe socio-cultural histories and ethnographic accounts on Sri Lanka, South India, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands. In addition, we discussed on some theoretical and methodological elaborations, especially on actor-network theory/methodology in analyzing public health development as well as economic development.We then concluded that although we obtained some interesting findings, our discussion seemed rather insufficient due to the lack of data and resources. This is because that this research did not aimed for field research for further information. We hence realized the necessity to reorganize this research with the fund for fieldwork in future.