ABSTRACT
Think for a moment about your last encounter with the biomedical health care system, say a visit to your family physician or general practitioner. What factors were involved in your experience? Here are just a few of the things you might consider: whether your visit was on a private or public scheme, how you paid for the visit, and whether your social status made a difference in the care you received. You might also recall how comfortable you felt in the doctor’s office, whether or not you agreed with her about what was wrong with you, and whether you were frightened or reassured by the medical technology you encountered. The first set of factors can be thought of as the result of medical system-wide political, economic and social structures; the second set the result of the meanings produced by individual humanistic concerns. We first encountered the roles of humanistic and structural factors in culture in Chapter 2 and left it at that. Now we take them up again and see how they apply more specifically to cultures of health. The structural perspective is illustrated with a section on unhealthy societies and the humanistic perspective with a consideration of the situation of deprived people. We will also show how both types of approaches have been used together in structuration studies. The structuration approach can be aided by some ideas that come from time geographies of health behaviour, the next topic treated in this chapter. Finally, a blend between structure and agency is illustrated with a section on mental health.
