A culture-centered exploration of health: constructions from rural Bangladesh

The traditional approach in health communication has historically adopted a linear model to explore and study health, without considering the voices of the subaltern sectors in academic discourse. Such linear models prescribe one-way knowledge, information, and transmission of beliefs from the core health sectors to the subalterns at the margins. The culture-centered approach to health focuses on co-constructing meanings of health through dialogic engagement with communities that are situated at the margins of mainstream discursive spaces. This co-constructive research investigates how members of a Bangladeshi rural community define, construct, and negotiate health issues in their everyday lives through their narratives of health, illness, and healing. The findings explicate how the community participants negotiate their health in terms of poverty, work, and structure, and highlights how the participants negotiate their marginalization through communicative practices. The in-depth narratives on their construction of health underscore possible entry points into constructing culture-centered praxis, pointing toward spaces of change.