Contents:
Table of contents, List of figures, List of boxes, Acknowledgements,Chapter 1:Introduction, Introduction, Culture, Place, Health, Narrating change. Chapter 2:Culture matters to health, Introduction, What is culture?, A brief history of traditional cultural geography, The emergence of a new cultural geography, Structuralism and humanism, postmodernism, Cultures of health, Cultural geographies of health, Cultural matters!, Further reading. Chapter 3:Studying culture/placing ourselves, Introduction, Surveying the field, The place of observation, Observation through participating/participating while observing, Embodied power, knowledge and observation, Interpreting texts, Conclusion, Further reading. Chapter 4:Structure and agency, Introduction, The structural approach, Unhealthy societies, The humanist approach, Deprived people, Integrating structure and agency, Treating the mad, Conclusions, Further reading. Chapter 5:Language/metaphor/health, Introduction, Word, words, words, Metaphors and meaning, Stories of illness, Knowledge, power, resistance, Medical encounters, And what about place?, Health and the media, Medical soaps, Imaginative literature, Listening to language, Further reading. Chapter 6:Cultural difference in health and place, Introduction, A woman's place in health care, Ethnic differences in health experience, Geographies of sexual orientation, People with disabilities, Conclusion, Further reading. Chapter 7:Landscapes of healing, Introduction, Nature as healer, Selling the places that heal, Symbolic healing landscapes, Therapeutic landscapes, Landscape/place/healing, Further reading. Chapter 8:Consumption, place and health, Introduction, The character of consumerism, The changing face of consumption landscapes, Symbolism, landscape and health care, Consumerist ideology in the landscape, Finding space for non-consumers, Conclusion, Further reading. Chapter 9:Conclusion, Introduction, Theoretical diversity, Key questions, The disciplinary/interdisciplinary tension, What makes a health geographer today? Bibliography

Series Information:
Critical Geographies

Putting Health into Place draws together original works that collectively argue for a reinvention of medical geography. There is a growing interest worldwide in relationships between human health and the experience of place, an interest driven both by developments in sociocultural theory and observed health concerns. This book is a resource for those wishing to explore or to teach beyond the frontiers of conventional medical geography. As the first word of the book's title suggests, this is an active volume, one that contributes to situating health in the simultaneously tangible, negotiated, and experienced realities of place. Robin A. Kearns and Wilbert M. Gesler argue that medical issues are a necessary but insufficient focus in developing geographies of health and healing. This contention is supported by the authors of the thirteen substantive chapters who convey research findings from the Americas, Britain, and the Pacific. This book represents a collective commitment to exploring links between social and cultural theory, ideas about place, and discourses on health that will be of interest to readers across the social and health sciences.