and impacts can be appreciated by comparison
with the prevailing view of ‘health’
in modern western cultures is instructive.
In those societies a narrow, individual-focused,
and often misleading model of health
and its determinants prevails.
This model reflects in part
the powerful recent influence
of neoliberalism,
viewing individuals as free agents, responsible for
their own actions and consumer choices. Individuals are thus deemed to
be, in large part, the arbiters of their own health.
The corollary of this view is that people are therefore less
inclined to ask how the community's shared way of living and