Socio/Ethno-epidemiologies: proposals and possibilities from the Latin American production

Abstract

This article presents an approach to understanding health that acquires an original and autonomous development across different Latin American countries, despite being the result of reading and analysing national and international theoretical contributions from social sciences. The proposal seeks to integrate the epidemiologic perspective with those from the social sciences, sociology, and medical anthropology in particular, raising the need to place health problems in their socio-historic, cultural, political and economic context. From this framework, such aspects must be treated not only as epidemiological variables but, above all, as sociocultural and bio-ecological processes. It suggests to conceptually work from a perspective that investigates health-disease as a social process, an area of life in which most of the meanings, representations and practices that allow the reproduction of daily life are articulated. For that, we place the contributions in the field of Collective Health, present the main criticisms and limitations that have been raised to modern epidemiology and, from there, we develop theoretic-methodological proposals of ethno-epidemiology and sociocultural epidemiology directing the analysis towards the development of a superseding episteme.