spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

health reaches much further (or deeper) than economic structures and government policies,
because health and globalization also touch on socio-cultural and environmental aspects:
“Globalization, at its simplest, describes a constellation of processes by which nations,
businesses and people are becoming more connected and interdependent via increased economic
integration and communication exchange, cultural diffusion (especially of Western culture) and
travel” (Labonte & Torgerson 2005:158). In this light, it is simply not tenable to evaluate or act
upon the impact of globalization on health in an exclusively positive or negative way. The
ongoing polarized debate on the link between health and globalization, that is fuelled by the
pluralistic meaning of globalization, makes it hard to present the relation of globalization and
health in a comprehensive way.
There are plenty of global health initiatives, of which HIV/AIDS prevention programs and the
distribution of ARVs are the most obvious. In the slipstream of those global initiatives the (more
hidden) influence of the media on perceptions of health follow. One only needs to consider the
way African patients are presented to the Western world (and vice versa, the way African
patients are made aware of the altruistic attitude of the rich, Western world) in order to see the
impact of globalization: the connectedness and the interdependency of populations force people
to deal with otherness, resulting in conventional images and prejudices that accommodate the
aversion of the unknown, of the other. Research on HIV/AIDS in Africa has shown that Western
media generally present Africans as helpless victims and sexual deviant, backward people who
can only be saved by Western finances, science and responsibility. These kinds of images are
fuelled by globalization processes, and now they persist in health discourses in the African
context. Other examples of how globalization processes have become part of health discourses in
Africa are the presence of medicine and technology that are produced in other parts of the world,
the spreading of infectious diseases based on global mobility in combination with the
vulnerability of medical infrastructures in African countries, the depositing of superfluous
Western medicine in Africa, and the emergence of hybrid terminology regarding health, illness
and healing. These are but a few examples of the extensive range of globalization’s influence on
health perceptions and health actions in Africa.
1.3.5 Patient’s perspective
The notion of a particular worldview (or ‘picture of reality’ or lifeworld) that deeply influences
ideas, beliefs and conceptualizations of health and health-seeking behavior has become crucial in
health research. Any research on health should, therefore, recognize that health ideas and
practices can only be approached when the specific context in which health is conceptualized is
considered as well. This point has been promoted since the late 1970s when a new paradigm in
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