Bolest u procjepu biologije i kulture
Disease in a Rift Between Biology and Culture

The Postmodern Understanding of Disease as a Biocultural Phenomenon

Summary/Abstract: The intention of this paper is to highlight and reflect on the development of a tradition that considers the importance of cultural influences on health and illness. Delicate balance between illness and culture is what constitutes the elusive truth of illness and post-modern understanding of the illness as biocultural phenomenon in biocultural model. Using authors such as Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ivan Illich, David B. Morris and others helps to bring out the intricate, complex and subtle link between illness and culture. Scientifically based biomedical model, outdated in its Cartesian-mehanicistic conceptual scheme but growing in popularity at enormous speed, considers illness as an object and body as a mechanical machine. Although it did bring prosperity and eradicated many diseases, it offers us an alternative path to a new and still uncertain understanding of illness as transformable process, resulting as the intertwining of culture and biology. By putting an emphasis on this narrative, we will critically overview the existing dominant biomedical model of illness and we will consider the possibility of introducing a new biocultural model of illness expanding the existing biomedical model. The expected contribution of this work will go towards the possibilities of theoretical and practical foundation and a search for the possibility of the different pluriperspective and multidimensional approach to illness and health.

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