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Lifestyle Change, Vulnerability, and Health among the Awajún of the Peruvian Amazon
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Dissertation
Lifestyle Change, Vulnerability, and Health among the Awajún of the Peruvian Amazon
2015
Overview
In the last century, unprecedented ecological and cultural transformations have changed the lifestyles of humans across the globe. An issue of significant anthropological interest is to understand how these changes relate to the health and wellbeing of individuals living in indigenous communities in transition. This study uses a critical biocultural approach to investigate the relationship between lifestyle change, vulnerability, and health among the Awajún of the northern Peruvian Amazon. To do so, it pursues three primary objectives. First, it advances a critical biocultural approach by identifying and applying methods from critical medical anthropology and biocultural studies. Second, this study synthesizes perspectives from these two fields to arrive at a new interpretation of the concept of vulnerability that foregrounds the importance of focusing on indigenous populations in transition, the utility of a quantitative ‘risk-based approach’, and the need to use empirical approaches to measure vulnerability. Finally, it builds on this new interpretation of vulnerability to create the Index of Vulnerability (IoV), a multidimensional measure of stressor exposure that connects the social and ecological sphere to human perceptions and biology. For this investigation, 225 Awajún adults between the ages of 18 and 65 years of age were recruited from four communities located along Marginal Highway 5N in the province of Amazonas, Peru. Narratives, surveys, anthropometric measurements, and finger-stick blood samples, were collected from participants to investigate the relationship between lifestyles, vulnerability, and health. The Index of Vulnerability was found to be significantly associated with perceived stress, somatic symptoms, and depression in women and with BMI, summary skinfolds, and triglyceride levels in men. The range of mental and physical health outcomes associated with the Index of Vulnerability indicates that it is a useful, theoretically-informed measure of stressor exposure that has significant predictive value in an indigenous Amazonian population in transition.
Publisher
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Subject
ISBN
9781321783131, 1321783132
