Download or read book An Ethnography of Biomedicine and Healing in Rural Bangladesh written by Md. Faruk Shah and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis provides an ethnographic account of the ways in which biomedicine, as a part of the modernization of healthcare, has been localized and established as the culturally dominant medical system in rural Bangladesh. I show how biomedical institutions and medical professionals are becoming entrenched as almost unquestioned authorities in the domain of healthcare through the backing of the state, government and non-government organisations, pharmaceutical companies, and the market economy. I offer an anthropological critique of biomedicine in rural Bangladesh that explains how the existing social inequalities and disparities in healthcare are intensified by the practices undertaken in biomedical health centres through the healthcare bureaucracy and local gendered politics. I employ critical and interpretative approaches in medical anthropology to examine the meaning and nature of biomedicine, addressing how biomedicine has been recognized and accommodated in the local medical system of rural Bangladesh. I have systematically analysed this through the exploration of the health seeking behaviour of a Bangladeshi rural community and the community members' experiences with local clinics and biomedical hospitals which locals frequent for healthcare. This study of villagers' healthcare practices has led me to the analysis of the local healthcare bureaucracy, corruption, structural violence, commodification of health, pharmaceutical promotional strategies, gender discrimination in healthcare and population control. My findings suggest that biomedicine has already achieved cultural authority, acceptability and power at almost all levels of public and private health sectors in Bangladesh, as well as becoming the major and regular healthcare option for the local people as an element of the desire for progress, prosperity and modernity. However, in this system, bureaucracy is shaped by social capital, power relations and kin networks, and corruption is an integral part of daily care practices. This distinct version of rural Bangladeshi biomedicine contributes to medical anthropology by reinforcing that biomedicine is not homogenous in terms of its underlying philosophy and practice; rather it has numerous forms and approaches that depend upon geographic location, sociocultural settings, social hierarchy, bureaucracy, accountability, corruption, and a healthcare system characterized by medical pluralism. My multilevel ethnographic study thus contributes to medical anthropology by expanding scholarly understandings of the nature, practice and localization process of biomedicine(s) and bureaucracy in rural Bangladesh.