Symposium on Indigenous Health and the Contribution of Sociology
Special Issue of Health Sociology Review
Volume 10 Issue 2 November 2001
v+136 pages ISBN 978-1-921348-28-0
Editors:
Jane Shoebridge and Eileen Willis
Flinders University, Adelaide SA
This 2001 Special Issue of Health Sociology Review arises out of the challenge to sociologists to engage in Indigenous health.
It traces the history of the provision or lack of health care for Aboriginal people in Australia, examining the various institutional responses to their health needs, including state government care, missionary institutions in remote regions, and in the post-referendum period, federal and community controlled services.
The symposium explores some of the cultural and structural factors involved in the provision of health care to Indigenous people and raises questions about the impact of specific health professionals and their professional structures on the kinds of health care provided. The professional relationship between doctors, nurses and Aboriginal health workers is explored as is the influence these three health providers have on the way Indigenous health and health beliefs and practices are constructed and understood.
The influence of policies of self-determination and the impact of community controlled health services are also examined. The ability of these services to resist incorporation, mainstreaming and budget cuts presents an intriguing account of a robust social movement.
The collection provides a thoughtful and well researched presentation of the current situation in Indigenous health care and weighs up the relative strengths of anthropology (including ethnography), psychology, psychiatry, social epidemiology, social history and political science before arriving at a sociologically informed model of both causation and beneficial social change.
Taken together, these papers should indeed challenge sociologists about to embark on studies in the field of Indigenous health and illness. They span the sociological spectrum of theory and method and consider the merits of using classical structural analysis with or without approaches such as demography; critical ethnography; social constructionism; analysis of formal and informal medical texts; case studies of health policy, health intervention and health promotion programmes; and sociologically informed history, especially of Aboriginal political movements and their profound effects at national and local levels. We hope this symposium inspires sociologists to take the challenge further.
The symposium provides valuable ideas and outlines for further sociological research and is an important read for researchers, students and professional health care workers involved with Indigenous health. It draws together an historical picture of Indigenous health that has been generally lacking.
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