Intersubjetividades estructuradas: la salud en Colombia como dilema epistemológico y político para las Ciencias Sociales

• Main Author: César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero; Diana Goretty Oviedo-Manrique
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana 2008-07-01
• Series: Universitas Humanística
• Subjects: health; Law 100; subjectivities; agency; structure.
• Online Access: http://revistas.javeriana.edu.co/index.php/univhumanistica/article/view/2101/1327

Illness, as a subject of study and social intervention, allows us to conduct epistemological and political debates in the realm of Social and Health Sciences. We start with proposing academic exercises about “experiences during illness” instead of insisting in the modern ideal of health. Based on the history of Astrid and her struggle to get quality medical attention for her daughter, we discuss her actions, framed within a violent structure: the commercialized Colombian healthcare system. We use the tension between agency and structure, prevailing model in Social Sciences, to propose a methodological, epistemological and political movement that we call Structured Intersubjectivities. We argue that we should not be unaware of the structure or concede that is has a determining influence on the subject, but that we need to think about the actions of the subject (his or her capacity of agency) as a quality of the subjectivity that occurs in social interactions and in specific historical moments.