This book constitutes the first part of a two-volume study. Banerji is one of the few scholars who have tried to see health-related behavior and health services in the wider framework of the economic, political, demographic and social characteristics of rural populations. Having rejected the socio-philosophical approach of those termed the first generation social anthropologists and sociologists, and the dependence of the second generation on ‘Western reference frames’ Banerji attempts to develop ‘concepts and methods that are in tune with the social and cultural conditions prevailing in India’. Accordingly, his concept of health culture and a methodological approach related to it are set out to counter such ‘rapidly emerging exotic cults as Ethnomedicine, Folk Medicine and Traditional Asian Medicine’. The study covers a broad canvas. Banerji and his team collected voluminous data, spread over nine years on a large number of parameters, to provide socio-economic profiles of nineteen villages extended across eight states. The last revisit took place in March 1981. This time-span provides a fairly long-term per¬spective to the study.
July-August 1983, volume 8, No 1