Health is a daily negotiated dynamic experience: Lessons from indigenous populations for Health Communication

This research explores the construction of meanings to health and HIV/AIDS in the lives of indigenous/ tribal people of Koraput, India and offers a grounded theory highlighting the alternate rationalities and understandings of health.  The study conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews with 67 indigenous participants in the marginalized community over a period of 8 weeks of data collection. Their responses about health and HIV/AIDS were analyzed using the thematic grounded theory and themes identified. The tribal participant’s voices conveyed that health was polysemous in its meaning and located within their structural and cultural framework. The analysis of the tribal voices underlined that “health is a daily negotiated dynamic experience” for them. Two sub-themes viz., “multiple dynamic meanings of health and ii) money enables and constraints access to health”; supported and explained the nuanced daily experiences and negotiation of health for the tribal participants. This research extended the previous culture centered concepts of health by affirming the complex nature of health communication and providing new insights into ways in which we can design more efficient health communication campaigns taking community meanings of health into consideration, particularly in tribal, indigenous and remote communities. The results also inform US and International policy that health policies and communication interventions with tribal indigenous populations, minorities, should make space for the community voices that bring in the local structural and cultural conditions into foreground.