Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 125

Reflecting on the evolution of our attention to the idea of cultural competence, Kirmayer (2012) offered the following observation:

In actual practice, cultural competence in the US has been largely approached through sensitization of clinicians to the social predicaments of these ethnoracial blocs or through efforts at ethnic matching of patient and practitioner. The cultural competence literature tends to treat culture as a matter of group membership (whether self-assigned or ascribed). This assumes that members of a group share certain cultural “traits,” values, beliefs and attitudes that strongly influence or determine clinically relevant behaviour. Unfortunately, this approach tends to reify and essentialize cultures as consisting of more or less fixed sets of characteristics that can be described independently of any individual’s life history or social context—hence the plethora of textbooks with chapters on specific ethnocultural groups. This is an old-fashioned view, now largely abandoned by anthropology. (p. 155)

Contemporary anthropology, according to Kirmayer (2012), emphasizes that culture is not a fixed characteristic of people, either as individuals or as groups. It is an ongoing process of sharing and using knowledge that depends on variables in communities that interface between ethnocultural communities and institutions of the larger society, like the health care system. As a result, cultures are constantly undergoing change. Yet cultural processes remain central to the health promotion and health delivery system.

This requires a different approach to cultural competence that includes respect for the identity of individuals and communities with attention to the politicized nature of individuals and interactions with collectives, both local and global. This cultural identity must be understood with regard to multiple networks of communities and the larger society.