Health, Ethnicity and Diabetes

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction

   • Harshad Keval

   Pages 1-11

3. Contextualising the ‘Risky’ South Asian Diabetic Body

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

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   2. Conceptualising Race, Ethnicity, and Health

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 15-37

   3. Situating the South Asian Diabetic Risk

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 39-59

   4. Constructing the Risk: Faulty Lifestyles, Faulty Genes

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 61-86

   5. Method

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 87-98

4. Resisting Constructions of Risk: The Counter-Narratives

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 99-103

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   2. Doing Everyday Diabetes

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 105-128

   3. Using Complementary Health and Remedies

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 129-145

   4. Diabetes, Biography, and Community

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 147-166

   5. ‘Race-ing’ Back to the Bio-genetic Future?

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 167-183

   6. Conclusion

      • Harshad Keval

      Pages 185-194

5. Back Matter

   Pages 195-201

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This book explores the often contentious relationship between health, concepts of race and ethnicity, and the impact on South Asian groups. Using medical sociological and anthropological perspectives, it excavates racialised constructions of diabetes ‘risk’ within discourses, and highlights the contrasting counter narratives in people’s accounts of their everyday lives.

By identifying a number of components to the discursive, racialised construction of ‘risky’ South Asian bodies, this book problematises taken for granted understandings of culture, lifestyle and genetic risk. The mobilisation of these mechanisms in health science and interventions result in a racialising gaze, directed at groups already experiencing historically embedded race-related issues. The book situates these constructions of risk against the emergent, fluid and dynamic counter narratives to risk constructions. The new found momentum in genetic science is also critiqued in its formulation of racial-genetic risk, especially in the case of diabetes in South Asian groups, and is identified as perpetuating a series of racializing processes.

• Science and society
• Disease
• Illness
• Race
• Ethnicity
• Body
• Medical sociology
• Minority cultures
• Hindu Gujaratis
• socio-cultural studies
• area studies

“This is an important study of lived experience of a chronic condition, diabetes, against the background of race, ethnicity and notions of difference. It constitutes an important addition to the sociological literature on chronic illness generally and ethnicity, race and chronic illness in particular. The study is impressively contextualised within relevant sociological literatures. The book is an important resource for academic researchers, students and policy makers like.” (Professor Waqar Ahmad, Middlesex University, UK)

• Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, United Kingdom

  Harshad Keval

Harshad Keval is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, UK. He has held posts in Switzerland and the UK and has worked on the intersection of race, ethnicity, culture and health in a variety of countries and contexts, including mental health in South Asia, childhood illnesses in Tanzania and Leprosy in Sri Lanka. His work recently has focused on the racialised constructions of risk in South Asian populations in the UK. He has published previously on the discursive constructions of racialised risk in contemporary health arenas, ‘normalised’ race based rhetoric in contemporary political contexts, and the emergent concerns around post-race discourse and immigration.

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