AFTERnow

‘Consumer culture lives and breeds in the cultural deficits of modernity.’

(Slater, 1997)

Within the discipline of public health, culture tends either to be taken for granted or viewed as too remote, diffuse or complex an issue to be usefully related to broad health and social problems. The ‘problems’ of well-being are clearly a cultural issue, but this remains under-recognised. We need to turn to the social sciences for a theoretically informed analysis of the nature and consequences of cultural modernity, though there are few simple answers here. 

The social sciences view culture as the set of knowledge, beliefs, values and systems of symbolic meanings that we draw on in our everyday lives, which shape how we see the world and how we act in it.  Culture, like human biology and the social structure, influences the goals that we pursue and the resources that we have available for doing so: the point to bear in mind is that those resources are inequitably distributed across the social structure.  Moreover, culture everywhere is now accepted to be in a state of constant flux rather than a fixed and insulated way of life for discrete sets of peoples.