Chronic Cultural Impossibility: When the rights to health of indigenous people are at stake in the context of international politics of migration

• In Event: «Nuestra América» y Epistemologías del Sur

Abstract

Although health professionals generally embrace conceptions of health as a fundamental right, many practitioners use a framework that, in critical race scholar Denise Silva's terms, “produces and regulates human condition and establishes (morally and intellectually) a distinct kind of human being.” How can a professional commitment to prioritize the health and basic services got low-income racialized minority populations go hand-in-hand with efforts to justify the denial of effective and comprehensive health and other basic services? In the Delta Amacuro rainforest in of eastern Venezuela, indigenous Warao communities were devastated by a cholera epidemic in 1992-1993. In addition to the deaths themselves, the stigmatization that followed the epidemic and efforts to live closer to health care facilities prompted large, semi-permanent migrations to Venezuelan cities. An epidemic in 2007-2008 that was identified clinically as bat-transmitted rabies similarly underlined the fatal effects of health/communicative inequities, the failure of professionals to treat members of stigmatized populations as capable of participating actively in forms of communication associated with clinical care, health education, epidemiology, and health policy. This paper traces efforts by this population in both epidemics and recent massive migrations to Brazil to use their capacity to produce knowledge, to find answers, design strategies, and propose solutions. Professionals' "immodest claims of causality" (Paul Farmer) were based on a logic of "chronic cultural impossibility" that blames "indigenous culture," thereby thwarting the possibility of generating collaborative efforts to foster policies and practices capable of addressing both healthcare and migration issues.

Author

• Clara Mantini-Briggs, Independent Scholar