City and cosmology: genetics, health, and urban living in Dubai.

City and cosmology: genetics, health, and urban living in Dubai. Anthropol Med. 2018 Apr;25(1):68-84 Authors: Parkhurst A Abstract In light of increasingly high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity among citizens of the Arabian Gulf, popular health discourse in the region has emphasised the emergent Arab genome as the primary etiological basis of major health conditions. However, after many years of public dissemination of genomic knowledge in the region, and widespread acceptance of this knowledge among Gulf Arab citizens, the rates of chronic illness continue to increase. This paper briefly explores the clash between indigenous Islamic knowledge systems and biomedical knowledge systems imported into the United Arab Emirates. It presents vignettes collected from interviews and participant observation in Dubai as part of nearly four years of ethnographic research, completed as part of the author's doctoral work on 'Anxiety and Identity in Southeast Arabia'. Rather than radically informing health seeking behaviours among many UAE citizens, the emphasis on the 'Arab Genome' has instead reconfirmed the authority of Bedouin cosmological understandings of disease, reshaping the language that people use to engage with their bodies and their health. Local cosmology remains a powerful discursive element that often operates in contention, in sometimes powerfully subtle ways, with novel health initiative regimes. For many people in th...
Source: Anthropology and Medicine - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Tags: Anthropol Med Source Type: research