El regreso de la reciprocidad. Grupos de ayuda mutua y asociaciones de personas afectadas en la crisis del Estado del Bienestar.
The general objective is to analyze the resorts of assistance based on mutual help and the voluntary association of people affected by health problems, identifying what role they play in the current social and political context.<br/>Mutual help groups (MHG) and health associations (HA) are ass...
| Autor: | |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2002 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/8411 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://www.tdx.cat/TDX-0613103-123814 http://hdl.handle.net/10803/8411 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | salut associacions ajuda mútua reciprocitat 00 572 |
| Sumario: | The general objective is to analyze the resorts of assistance based on mutual help and the voluntary association of people affected by health problems, identifying what role they play in the current social and political context.<br/>Mutual help groups (MHG) and health associations (HA) are associative resorts which are placed between domestic self-assistance and institutionalized health dispositives. They try to supply alternative issues in some problems to public services lacks and to insufficiencies of domestic self-assistance in the current social context.<br/>184 associations have been analyzed in the town of Barcelona. 130 of them are related to sickness, the majority chronic pathologies, which represent the segment that shows a biggest increase. Addictions and the so called special situations are the objects of the remaining associations.<br/>The field of MHG and HA displays important confusions between different associative shapes. The research tries to discriminate these different shapes and the functions they perform, applying the conceptual tools on reciprocity and redistribution proposed by economical anthropology. Mutual help is taken as the diacritic factor and it is defined as a form of horizontal, symmetrical and generalized reciprocity between people which they share a history of the same problem.<br/>HA are constituted in order to reach objectives that need a kind of organization more complex than MHG. In the Spanish case, the classic model for the constitution of HA from an original MHG has been followed only by a minority of organizations. The majority of them were constituted as formal HA from the beginning. Some of them have MHG in their structure, but others do not apply any kind of mutual help activities.<br/>In Spain, MHG have not been the main reference for HA, a fact that makes easier the confusion between MHG, therapy groups and other forms of organization, and also that MHG became a minority among associations in the health field.<br/>MHG are a result of free voluntary association and they respond to contemporary schemes based on specialization, plurality of models and electivity.<br/>In the latin-catholic area there are traditions of dependency deeply rooted in practices of assistance. With the late diffusion of conceptions related to individual and civil autonomy linked to ideologies of liberal capitalism, this factor raised difficulties in our country for the development of mutual help outside of primary groups.<br/>MHG are build on the kind of reciprocity mentioned before and they represent statements of self-assistance and self-care in an extra-domestical space. They constitute a place of appropriation, elaboration and contrast of instrumental, emotional and relational knowledges and abilities for members. The shared history of the same problem conferes identity to the group allowing to redefine autonomously the lived situation. At the same time, this identity creates the conditions of equivalence between people involved, allowing the development of horizontal and symmetrical reciprocity. MHG build their own explanatory models through narratives generated by themselves, which are the basis for their particular adaptative answers.<br/>On the other hand, HA are generaly placed in the space of redistribution, since their main resources are attained from public subventions and secondariliy from private sources. HA act as substitute of public services where they do not exist or they are insufficient. As extensions of these services, they tend to reproduce definitions and practices of professional models, raising difficulties for an autonomous redefinition based on the experience of affection.<br/>Current tendencies to displace responsabilities on assistance to the Third Sector encourage that last model, which do not question the hegemony of professional models, moving mutual help to an space that is perceived as private, like the position occupied by domestic self-assistance in the whole societ |
|---|