Madeleine Leininger: claroscuro trascultural / Madeleine Leininger: Clear and dark transcultural

A principios de la década de los años 60, Madeleine Leininger conceptualiza y funda la Enfermería transcultural, pero a pesar de la vigencia y reconocimiento que actualmente posee la enfermería transcultural, ésta no se escapa de un territorio claro-oscuro de contradicciones y dicciones. ¿Qué concepto de cultura utiliza Madeleine Leininger? ¿Qué consecuencias implica su transculturalidad? En el artículo se debate la particularidad conceptual utilizada por Leininger. Así mismo se propone cambiar terminológicamente y conceptualmente significados y significantes como la etnoenfermería y los conceptos de transculturalidad que a ella refieren. Para evitar los determinismos culturales se considera más correcto hablar de las identidades culturales, propias e individuales. La enfermería debe establecer un diálogo transcultural con las identidades culturales, con las medicinas y enfermerías transculturales. Un diálogo en igualdad, no sin por ello renunciar a la riqueza y eficiencia de la enfermería y de la medicina occidentales (AU)

At the beginning of the decade of the 60s, Madeleine Leininger conceptualizes and founds the nursing transcultural, but in spite of the current force and recognition that nowadays possesses the nursing transcultural, this does not escape of a clear - dark territory of contradictions and dictions. What concept of culture does Madeleine Leininger use? What consequences does it imply her transculturality? In the article the conceptual particularity used by Leininger is debated. Likewise it proposes to change the term and conceptual important and significant as the etno-infirmary and the concepts of transcultural that recount her. To avoid the cultural determinisms it is more correct to speak about the cultural, own and individual identities. The nursing must establish a dialog transcultural with the cultural identities, with the medicines and transcultural nursing. A dialog in equality, not without for it to resign the richness and efficiency of the nursing and of the western medicine (AU)

Said another way: stroke, evolution, and the rainforests: an ancient approach to modern health care.

TOPIC: The relatively new discipline of evolutionary medicine. PURPOSE: To raise awareness among healthcare professionals that our modern view of illness and health care might be flawed. SOURCES OF INFORMATION: Published literature in CINAHL, MEDLINE, Cochrane databases, and EMBASE. CONCLUSIONS: Our modern lifestyles and healthcare paradigms (using stroke as example), may be at odds with our palaeolithic genome. The dietary regimes of remaining hunter-gatherer communities merit attention and study in this regard. Time is running out as the rainforests dwindle and hunter-gatherer communities are acculturated. The selective forces that resulted in the evolution of the human species were mainly environmental. Our metabolism, physiology, and genome, therefore, are geared towards survival under certain environmental parameters. With the advent of agriculture, almost 11,000 years ago, those parameters changed. Our ancestors' lifestyles transformed from wandering hunter-gatherers to sedentary consumers of more than they needed to survive. Many studies link today's prevalence of metabolic syndrome (diabetes, obesity, and cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases) in developed countries with this historic change in human behavior. If this is a valid correlation to make, then the few remaining hunter-gatherer communities in today's rainforests must surely hold the key to human health. Certainly, physiological parameters in these people are impressive, but trends are worrying. There is clear derangement of these parameters when exposed to any degree of acculturated lifestyle. In addition, the natural homelands of these communities, the rainforests, are dwindling at an alarming rate in order to maintain our acculturated norms. The race is on, therefore, to learn what we can about diet, exercise, and natural medicine from the last few humans who live lifestyles that might be closest to our natural state.

Emergent properties in small-scale societies.

A multi-agent simulation is used to explore the relationship between the micro and the macro levels in small-scale societies. The simulation demonstrates, using an African hunter-gatherer group (the !Kung san) as a case study, the way in which population stability may arise from culturally framed, micro-level decision making by women about spacing of births. According to the simulation, population stability as an emergent property has different implications, depending on resource density. Data on Australian hunter-gatherer groups are presented that support the implications of the simulation. !Kung san micro-level cultural rules on incestuous marriages are shown to have macro-level consequences in the form of marriages between residential camps. Between-camp marriages have significant implications for access to resources and thereby for population dynamics of the group as a whole.

The evolution of social behavior in the prehistoric American southwest.

Long House Valley, located in the Black Mesa area of northeastern Arizona (USA), was inhabited by the Kayenta Anasazi from circa 1800 B.C. to circa A.D. 1300. These people were prehistoric precursors of the modern Pueblo cultures of the Colorado Plateau. A rich paleoenvironmental record, based on alluvial geomorphology, palynology, and dendroclimatology, permits the accurate quantitative reconstruction of annual fluctuations in potential agricultural production (kg maize/hectare). The archaeological record of Anasazi farming groups from A.D. 200 to 1300 provides information on a millennium of sociocultural stasis, variability, change, and adaptation. We report on a multi-agent computational model of this society that closely reproduces the main features of its actual history, including population ebb and flow, changing spatial settlement patterns, and eventual rapid decline. The agents in the model are monoagriculturalists, who decide both where to situate their fields and where to locate their settlements.

The ethnological approach--comparing cultures.

In most known societies, until now, it has been an advantage to moderate and control the different aspects of the capacity to love, including love of nature, and to develop the human potential for aggressiveness. The greater the need to develop aggression and the ability to destroy life, the more intrusive the rituals and cultural beliefs in the period around birth have become.

Should we set a place for diet in ethnopharmacology?

Ethnopharmacologic inquiry is most invincibly pursued by addressing "medicinals" across the divers contexts through which populations gain exposure to the material of their pharmacopoeia. Attention to multiple categories of use advances our comprehension of indigenous health care by providing a framework for laboratory investigations that explore the bioactive potential of the materia medica to influence the occurrence and expression of disease, and that determine how those physiologic outcomes may be further mediated by the context-specific vicissitudes of preparation, combination and consumption. Consideration of the dietary contexts of local "medicines" is central to this wider perspective.