Health Care in Maya Guatemala

Health Care in Maya Guatemala PDF Author: John Palmer Hawkins
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806138596
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book examines medical systems and institutions in three K'iche' Maya communities to reveal the conflicts between indigenous medical care and the Guatemalan biomedical system. It shows the necessity of cultural understanding if poor people are to have access to medicine that combines the best of both local tradition and international biomedicine.

Health Care in Maya Guatemala

Health Care in Maya Guatemala PDF Author: John Palmer Hawkins
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806138596
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines medical systems and institutions in three K'iche' Maya communities to reveal the conflicts between indigenous medical care and the Guatemalan biomedical system. It shows the necessity of cultural understanding if poor people are to have access to medicine that combines the best of both local tradition and international biomedicine.

Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism

Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism PDF Author: Anita Chary
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498505384
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism is the first collection of its kind to explore the contemporary terrain of healthcare in Guatemala through reflective ethnography. This volume offers a nuanced portrait of the effects of healthcare privatization for indigenous Maya people, who have historically endured numerous disparities in health and healthcare access. The collection provides an updated understanding of medical pluralism, which concerns not only the tensions and exchanges between ethnomedicine and biomedicine that have historically shaped Maya people’s experiences of health, but also the multiple competing biomedical institutions that have emerged in a highly privatized, market-driven environment of care. The contributors examine the macro-structural and micro-level implications of the proliferation of non-governmental organizations, private fee-for-service clinics, and new pharmaceuticals against the backdrop of a deteriorating public health system. In this environment, health seekers encounter new challenges and opportunities, relationships between the public, private, and civil sectors transform, and new forms of inequality in access to healthcare abound. This volume connects these themes to critical studies of global and public health, exposing the strictures and apertures of healthcare privatization for marginalized populations in Guatemala.

Unsafe Motherhood

Unsafe Motherhood PDF Author: Nicole S. Berry
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845459962
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
“[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general.”—Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally. From the Introduction: An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women’s survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.

Time Among the Maya

Time Among the Maya PDF Author: Ronald Wright
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802137289
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
The Maya created one of the world's most brilliant civilizations, famous for its art, astronomy, and deep fascination with the mystery of time. Despite collapse in the ninth century, Spanish invasion in the sixteenth, and civil war in the twentieth, eight million people in Guatemala, Belize, and southern Mexico speak Mayan languages and maintain their resilient culture to this day. Traveling through Central America's jungles and mountains, Ronald Wright explores the ancient roots of the Maya, their recent troubles, and prospects for survival. Embracing history, anthropology, politics, and literature, Time Among the Maya is a riveting journey through past magnificence and the study of an enduring civilization with much to teach the present. "Wright's unpretentious narrative blends anthropology, archaeology, history, and politics with his own entertaining excursions and encounters." -- The New Yorker; "Time Among the Maya shows Wright to be far more than a mere storyteller or descriptive writer. He is an historical philosopher with a profound understanding of other cultures." -- Jan Morris, The Independent (London).

A New Dawn in Guatemala

A New Dawn in Guatemala PDF Author: Richard Luecke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description


Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics PDF Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691058825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics. The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Maya Resurgence in Guatemala

Maya Resurgence in Guatemala PDF Author: Richard Wilson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806131955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval--religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Q’eqchi’-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing--abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations--have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Q’eqchi’ ethnic identity.

The Weight of Obesity

The Weight of Obesity PDF Author: Emily Yates-Doerr
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520286820
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
A woman with hypertension refuses vegetables. A man with diabetes adds iron-fortified sugar to his coffee. As death rates from heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes in Latin America escalate, global health interventions increasingly emphasize nutrition, exercise, and weight loss—but much goes awry as ideas move from policy boardrooms and clinics into everyday life. Based on years of intensive fieldwork, The Weight of Obesity offers poignant stories of how obesity is lived and experienced by Guatemalans who have recently found their diets—and their bodies—radically transformed. Anthropologist Emily Yates-Doerr challenges the widespread view that health can be measured in calories and pounds, offering an innovative understanding of what it means to be healthy in postcolonial Latin America. Through vivid descriptions of how people reject global standards and embrace fatness as desirable, this book interferes with contemporary biomedicine, adding depth to how we theorize structural violence. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the politics of healthy eating.

Maya Textiles of Guatemala

Maya Textiles of Guatemala PDF Author: Margot Blum Schevill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Informative and beautifully illustrated.... It is both a detailed anthropological study, which delves into aspects of Mayan culture and examines historical and sociological forces brought to bear on Mayan communities of Guatemala, and a catalog of the stunning collections, containing descriptions of techniques, dying processes, and textile production. -- Booklist

Poverty in Guatemala

Poverty in Guatemala PDF Author:
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821355527
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Available evidence suggests that poverty levels in Guatemala are higher than other Central American countries, with data for 2000 showing over half of all Guatemalans (about 6.4 million people) living in poverty, with about 16 per cent classified as living in extreme poverty. This report provides a multi-dimensional analysis of poverty in the country, using both quantitative and qualitative data, as well as examining the impact of government policies and spending on the poor. Policy options and priorities for poverty reduction strategies are identified under the key challenges of building opportunities and assets, reducing vulnerabilities, improving institutions and empowering communities.