This book presents a health ethnology of health literacy among vulnerable groups. In addition to a comprehensive state of research and the development of a theory-oriented health literacy research, three case studies on vulnerable minorities from Germany and Switzerland are presented. The social dimension of health and health literacy, which can hardly be conceptualized in the individualistic competence-theoretical approaches, is particularly clearly highlighted. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Health Literacy aus gesundheitsethnologischer Perspektive by Uwe H. Bittlingmayer, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

Im vorliegenden Buch wird eine Gesundheitsethnologie der Gesundheitskompetenz von vulnerablen Gruppen vorgelegt. Dabei werden neben einem umfassenden Forschungsstand und die Entwicklung einer theorie-orientierten Health-Literacy-Forschung drei Fallstudien uber vulnerable Minderheiten aus Deutschland und der Schweiz prasentiert. Besonders deutlich herausgestellt wird die soziale Dimension von Gesundheit und Gesundheitskompetenz, die in den individualistischen kompetenztheoretischen Zugangen kaum konzeptionalisiert werden kann.