Introduction – special issue, Latin American health sociology

Abstract

The health sociology literature, like other sub-disciplines of sociology, is very fractured. One division is clearly methodological – with specialists in high-end quantitative and qualitative techniques developing parallel discussions and rarely crossing over, despite very interesting contributions from mixed methods scholars (see De Maio, 2010). To its credit, Health Sociology Review has a rich history of publishing both quantitative and qualitative work. But another critical division – and one which has not been sufficiently acknowledged – is the divide between scholars in the global north and the global south. The sociology of health, for the most part, has not been global in its thinking – being late to enter debates in global health and failing to learn lessons from work in the global south (Cockerham & Cockerham, 2010; De Maio, 2014). It is our argument that Latin American health sociology has much to offer the larger field – both for what it can teach us about Latin America in and of itself, but also for what this field of scholarship can teach us about health and illness broadly defined. Mirroring Raewyn Connell’s argument in Southern Theory (2007), we believe that Latin American health sociology offers us lessons that we should learn from, and not just learn about. Latin American health sociology developed under an array of historical, contextual, and intellectual factors (Montagner, 2008). Like in other areas of the world, Latin American health sociology was influenced by medical anthropology, public health, and medicine, among other disciplines – with each perspective helping to shape the identification of problems, the collection of data, and the definition of research agendas. Perhaps most importantly, the Latin American tradition of social medicine – focused on the study of social inequality and the way in which it determines health-illness processes – influenced health sociology in the region (Barreto, 2004; Castro, 2001). This interest in the issue of social inequality has had a lasting impact on this field. Latin American health sociology has also been influenced by the general epidemiological profiles of countries in the region. Briceño-León (2003) has underlined that since the epidemiological transition in the region has not been completed, the sociology of health has had to deal with both the new and the old epidemiological patterns. In his words, ‘the sociology of health in Latin America is at the same time a sociology of the living conditions of poverty and of the lifestyles of the abundance’ (Briceño-León, 2003). The region