School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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Item'Well, that just complicates matters': The prevalence of long-term poverty in a rural Victorian community, and its interface with enactments of social and health policy directives through government agencies.(Australian and New Zealand Mental Health Association inc., 2015-12-21)This paper discusses aspects of a recent anthropological research project, broadly focused on use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in a rural Victorian community. Participative research facilitated an in-depth understanding of the lives and character of residents of the community, in terms of their experience of entrenched poverty, and the relationship of this circumstance to personal and family hardships, impacted further by formalised enactments of moral health policy directives and institutionalised duty-of-care, through government agencies, including the Department of Human Services, the mental health system, and decision-makers in the welfare sector. In a community where little employment is available within reasonable travelling distance, the most impoverished persons encountered during the research were sole-parents and their children, who are specifically affected by recent changes to welfare payment rates designed to stimulate their increased effort to find gainful employment. Building from simple structuring frameworks developed from anonymous quantitative appraisal of a poor segment of the community, and numerical tally of known community members and interviewees with mental health problems, the paper unpacks richly descriptive ethnographic data from the stories of research participants, particularly highlighting narratives about lives lived in the long-term role of sole-parents, and through the eyes of mentally ill persons. Recent ‘improvements’ in policy approaches – addressing the seeming worklessness of sole-parents, the need to accommodate children when family problems arise (often targeting Aboriginal, migrant, mentally ill, and sole-parent families), and the exercise of powerful and increasingly legalised sanctions that subjugate and control the experience of mental illness, for the benefit of sufferers, families and communities – provide an effective government-citizen interface that serves to complicate the life experiences of impoverished Australians, and seemingly overlooks attempts at realistic, supportive solutions. This problem was starkly apparent even in a relatively trouble-free yet poor community without imposed ‘income management’.
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ItemTraditional herbal medicine may promote wellbeing in Africa, consistent with the aims of post-2015 development goals.(AFSAAP, 2016-02-05)This paper is based on the theoretical background of a recent Australian anthropological research project describing persistent use of complementary, alternative and traditional medicine (CAM) by poor people, in a first-world country where CAM is positioned as marginal relative to dominant biomedicine. Studies found CAM’s sidelined status was especially prevalent in context of consumers supporting their own wellbeing while receiving conventional HIV/AIDS treatment. Due to ongoing medicalisation processes, a construed CAM marginality is also extended to traditional medicine use in resource-poor countries in Africa, despite pharmaceuticals often being unaffordable. Anthropological studies describe traditional medicine’s diminished social location in light of cultural considerations, and relevance to issues of poverty and socio-economic development. A growing body of ethnobotanical and laboratory research demonstrates potential uses and effectiveness of traditional indigenous and naturalised African herbs, for allaying hunger and ameliorating serious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, diarrhoea, and other infective, nutritional, and metabolic conditions. Traditional herbs may be protective where reduced dependence on expensive internationally-sourced pharmaceuticals is common, and reinforces the significance of cultural heritage in planning new developmental directions in challenging circumstances. The author acknowledges recent research about African herbal medicines, and suggests traditional herbal medicine is appropriate in African healthcare contexts, whether for treatment, maintenance of wellbeing, or to improve preventative care and health promotion. She highlights its prospective contribution to poverty alleviation and realisation of development goals.