Studying Health Developing Societies: A Conceptually‐Informed Research Agenda

Although health and health care have become leading topics on the research agenda of the social sciences, not much attention has been directed to the health situation of developing societies.Academic course offerings, as mirrored in university catalogues, and professional meetings of social science organizations reflect this lack.It stands out all the more as an area of neglect given the intensity of popular interest in health in Western societies (Cockerham 1983).Scholarly journals also reflect this lack.Academic publishing expanded enormously from the mid 1960's to the mid-1980's, with the appearance of many journals dedicated to minutely specialized topics.Despite this expansion, only two journals-Social Science and Medicine, and Culture Medicine and Psychiatry--demonstrate a consistent interest in publishing material on Third World health and illness.The former holds the wider focus, taking manuscripts from many social science disciplines, and dealing with broadly medical, as well as psychiatric conditions.The latter deals especially with psychiatric materials, interpreting them through anthropological paradigms.Among major sociological journals in the United States, the only one devoted to health -Journal of Health and Social Behavior -publishes little material on Third World health, save for a special issue in 1989 devoted entirely to that subject.How is this lack to be accounted for?Najman (1989) sees it as part of a reluctance of Western nation's to become involved in the latterday consequences, most of them adverse, of their earlier colonial domination of much of the developing world.Following the Second World War, "[wjhen the Western nations handed power back to indigenous administrations, they left behind the diseases they had introduced, but little else"(p.343).Najman's explanation amounts to an invocation of bad conscience; social scientists, located mainly in Western societies, shrink from studying societies that have been damaged, in health status as in other