Premium
Self‐Care at the Margins: Meals and Meters in Migrants’ Diabetes Tactics
Author(s) -
Guell Cornelia
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1111/maq.12005
Subject(s) - turkish , ethnography , disadvantaged , context (archaeology) , german , self care , health care , everyday life , nursing , psychology , gerontology , sociology , medicine , history , political science , anthropology , archaeology , philosophy , linguistics , law
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2006 and 2007, this article examines Turkish migrants’ everyday practices of diabetes self‐management in Berlin, Germany. To avoid diabetes complications, Turkish Berliners became self‐carers who altered food choices, cooking and eating practices, and made their self‐care practices visible with the help of blood sugar self‐testing. Rather than representing the common image of the disadvantaged migrant patient they assumed the role of “expert patients” and their self‐care was a deliberate practice to make their chronic illness experience manageable and tangible where formal support by the German healthcare system was inadequate. This article thus aims to interrogate both “self” and “care” in the context of “self‐care at the margins” and draw on de Certeau's tactics of the ordinary person that make everyday life habitable.