"The Question not Asked by a Disease...": Socio-economic Determinants of Health in the Era of Neoliberal Modernity
Abstract
The goal of this contribution is to use sociological/anthropological perspectives to identify and analyze the most prominent stress-inducing factors that are linked to the current socio-economic system and to the deep rift between this system and its ideological legitimization. Using some concepts derived from Lewis's theory of the culture of poverty and based on ethnographical examples from the field, we shall point out certain socially and psychologically devastating impacts of long-term material deprivation linked to various forms of social exclusion.
In this context, we shall primarily focus on the precarization of labor and the continuous trend of the undoing of the welfare state. We shall also discuss the manners in which such phenomena are followed by the process of commodification of health on the one hand and the medicalization of the social sphere on the other.
The last part of the contribution will be devoted to the question how these health-damaging social problems are linked to the current ideological meta-narratives of the Weberian ethos of labor, performance society, and meritocracy.