The advancement of technology has brought with it ease of modern living that allows citizens to spend less time with menial tasks and focus on more important ones such as working. This has lead to a highly capitalistic society where production and a 40+ hour work week is highly regarded and praised. In our culture the “American Dream” of working hard for the big house and nice car creates workaholics and is based on consumerist values. It is safe to say that the general population regards their occupation and their time off as two very different experiences in terms of pleasure. There are those who are lucky enough to look forward to going to work everyday but for most work is a means to an end, a way to buy that new car and provide for your family. Technology and more time to focus on other things has become a trap itself for people because of how society structures what are appropriate ways to use one’s time. We seem to have become more stuck in the rat race and at what cost, physically, to us?
Dennis Wiedman’s article “Globalizing Chronicities of Modernity” deals with the topic of diabetes mellitus and the metabolic disorder Metabolic Syndrome (MetS). The arrival of MetS “shifted the theoretical paradigm that diabetes was the result of ‘sugar consumption” to…’obesity”” (Wiedman 39) and is an overarching term for a group of factors such as raised blood lipids, glucose intolerance, etc. that indicate someone who is at a higher risk for developing metabolic disorders. Wiedman goes forth to make the argument that “the persistence in time of limitations and suffering that results in disabilities” (38) termed chronicity as the common and primary causes of these disorders that afflict so much of our current population. Weidman’s article delved into many different topics about how our population’s health has declined so much but the one I want to focus on is the discussion of modernity. Although Weidman uses indigenous people to demonstrate how forced urbanization through reservations and modern tools dramatically changed the culture from one of “substinence agriculture to a cash economy” (42) he also discusses other research focusing on different populations with the same outcome. This disconnect from one’s primary cultural practices and the act of governments that “create, maintain, and impose chronicities” result in a community and its members who are lost. This is further perpetuated by “healthcare activities once associated with family, kin, and tribe become the role of professionalized healers where health care is converted into monetary activities” (Weidman 47). How I see our own society is that through modernity our culture has disconnected from the pleasure of leisure activity and been herded towards the ideology of work.
The clip above deals with how television has created a culture of aspiration but I found myself relating the ideas expressed to our culture of working. By becoming sucked into this cycle of always wanting we have become more involved in work and thereby distanced from our own cultural values and support structures. In this realm, occupation can be posited as disabling in that it pushes people into margins away from their cultural habitus. The modern lifestyle is fraught with the inability to make a personal connection (with the advent of the internet and social networking) and lack of leisure time because of the pressure felt to be working or doing related activities during this time. The unattainable “American Dream” is just one of the perpetuators of our work driven lifestyle and this mindset seems to have created a “reservation” effect in our population. Just as Native Americans began to forgo their customs and identity, turning to urbanization and falling into the black hole, so has modern man fallen into the workforce and lost the ability to leisure for pleasure. Huffington Post's article on stress relief is just one of the many examples of advice given to people regarding ways to “de-stress” their life and exemplifies how out of touch we have become with our own needs and desires. We seem to have replaced these traditional values and ideas with capitalism and science. Similar to the effect we see in biomedicine as stripping one’s autonomy to become dependent on science, work has stripped away one’s sense of identity to become dependent on career as self.
The article “Chronic Conditions, Health, and Well-Being in Global Contexts” looks into occupational therapy and how its ideology is much more focused on empowering those disabled. From the reading, the base of occupational therapy relies on “the belief that all people need to engage in occupation” and that the therapist’s role is to enable a person to participate in these activities. Medical anthropologists have worked to conceptualize “health as well being in the positive sense, not merely as the absence of disease or infirmity” (Frank 240) and I believe that occupational therapy positively aims to empower patients. There seems to be much individualized treatment and is seen as an independent living paradigm rather than simply rehabilitating the sufferer (Frank 238). Occupational therapy appears to try to begin rebuilding people’s broken autonomy and power in the world of their suffering especially among those with disabilities who have had a long history of oppression in the biomedical field. However, it is valid to point that ultimately the goal of occupational therapy is for sufferer to become a contributing, productive member of society, a worker in the factory of our society. And as has been laid out previously, occupation is another disabling paradigm.
Ultimately, from the readings our physical disorders are truly manifestations of our mental pressures and stresses. In our fast paced, modern life we have lost touch with nature due to urbanization, cuisine due to fast and processed food, and exercise due to cars. We lead lives in where we have every luxury available and constantly seek the latest thrill or gadget but at what cost to ourselves?
Works Cited
Charlie Broker- How TV Ruined Your Life.
Frank, Gelya, Baum, C., and Law, M, 2010. “Chronic Conditions, Health, and Well-Being in Global Contexts: Occupational Therapy in Conversation with Critical Medical Anthropology.” In Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Chronicity and the Anthropology of Illness. Lenore Manderson and Carolyn Smith-Morris, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers university Press. Pp. 230-246.
No comments:
Post a Comment