This thesis examines the place of metaphor in biomedical knowledge about two major public health problems: cancer and coronary heart disease (CHD). Specifically, it considers why cancer is constituted by biomedicine in obviously metaphorical concepts that are also highly pejorative. Conversely, the metaphorical dimension of the biomedical knowledge concerning CHD is less obvious and less negative in its connotations. This thesis posits that the difference in linguistic styles associated with cancer and CHD can be accounted for by whether knowledge about them confirms or challenges the knowledge and value system of modernity. Cancer, as construed by biomedicine, appears to confound some important tenets of the epistemology and knowledge of modernity. In particular, it confounds the idea that the body is a machine and that nature is an inert order obeying objective laws. It thus suggests that the universe, including that of bodies, is not entirely subject to rational understanding and control. Women having irrational bodies and an affinity with unruly nature are primary sites for cancer. It is therefore hardly surprising that cancer's metaphors express a fear that order based on masculine rational agency is fragile. By contrast, biomedical knowledge about CHD appears to confirm key aspects of modernist knowledge. Specifically, it suggests that the (masculine) body can be understood as a machine that exists as part of a wider domain of nature that is inert and is fuelled by objective laws. Unlike cancer, which is depicted as mysterious and arcane, CHD is presented as an ailment with causes that are well understood and treatment that is effective, thus affirming the truth of rationality and technology. Coronary heart disease is construed overwhelmingly as a disease affecting men exercising their capacity for rational agency, free from the 'dictates' of an irrational body. Coronary heart disease is depicted as a disruption of supply and demand rather than as a threat to social order itself. In Durkheimian terms, sacred things can be pure and beneficent or they can take impure and threatening forms. Cancer expresses the impure, threatening dimension of sacredness in exposing threats to the knowledge and order of modernity. Conversely, coronary heart disease is profane, in those terms, since it offers apparent confirmation of the knowledge and order of modernity. Cancer makes us aware of deeply held values by making us conscious of threats to them but the knowledge of CHD is so congruent with the knowledge system of modernity, that it does not provoke us to examine that framework; it merely affirms our routine and mundane view of the world. These findings suggest that biomedicine can be regarded as a secular religion because it acts as a cosmology. Knowledge of the body and its ailments is set within a wider conceptual framework and value system recognizing and naming sources of order and danger. This further suggests that while biomedicine may be rightly regarded as a technical and instrumental body of knowledge, it is nevertheless fuelled by and intertwined with deeply held values and convictions that are beyond the domain of rationality. The unexamined, a-rational elements of biomedicine have been virtually ignored within public health and explain some of its limitations in defining and responding to familiar public health problems. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Department of Public Health, 2003.

<p>In contemporary public debate there is currently a great deal of focus attached to environmental problems and social responsibility. This trend is noticeable within the clothing industry, where it has become increasingly popular for new brands to market themselves with an environmental and ethical profile. An anthropological approach has been used to investigate how individuals understand ethical dimensions of clothing, and relates to the consumers’ ideals that are pronounced by clothing companies with an environmental and ethical profile. Interviews have been conducted with young men, a group often absent in accounts of ethical consumption. From these conversations, it is possible to discuss wider processes going on in society at large. Contemporary discourse on ethical shopping appears to rest on the assumption that the individual is able to freely choose among merchandise available on the market, and is placed in a central position of responsibility towards human and non-human others. There is a need for research that challenges this view. From the material it became visible that there existed a strong boundary from the informants´ point of view of what was mentioned as social problems or global issues, and of what they considered reasonable of themselves to bear responsibility for. Distrust was expressed against ongoing public debate that was considered to be too one-sided. Barely any references existed of ecological and fair made fashion, suggesting a generational gap in experiences of this kind of clothing. The study is considered to stimulate for further research in the area of ethical shopping of clothes.</p>

In contemporary public debate there is currently a great deal of focus attached to environmental problems and social responsibility. This trend is noticeable within the clothing industry, where it has become increasingly popular for new brands to market themselves with an environmental and ethical profile. An anthropological approach has been used to investigate how individuals understand ethical dimensions of clothing, and relates to the consumers’ ideals that are pronounced by clothing companies with an environmental and ethical profile. Interviews have been conducted with young men, a group often absent in accounts of ethical consumption. From these conversations, it is possible to discuss wider processes going on in society at large. Contemporary discourse on ethical shopping appears to rest on the assumption that the individual is able to freely choose among merchandise available on the market, and is placed in a central position of responsibility towards human and non-human others. There is a need for research that challenges this view. From the material it became visible that there existed a strong boundary from the informants´ point of view of what was mentioned as social problems or global issues, and of what they considered reasonable of themselves to bear responsibility for. Distrust was expressed against ongoing public debate that was considered to be too one-sided. Barely any references existed of ecological and fair made fashion, suggesting a generational gap in experiences of this kind of clothing. The study is considered to stimulate for further research in the area of ethical shopping of clothes.

In response to the anthropological literature on old age and ageing that remains largely isolated from more contemporary anthropological theory, this thesis re-focuses anthropological attention on the experiences of ageing. Towards this end, I examine the way macro- (history, politics, economics) and micro-level processes (social relations, intergenerational relations, local contexts, individual histories) intersect to frame the cultural construction of old age, personal experiences of "being old", and the self. A central point of intersection between these processes comes from the recent history of social transformation in my fieldsite, Dodworth, a former coal-mining village. Since the late 1980s, this is an area that has been grappling with the rupturing effects of the closure of the coal-mining industry. Attending to these conditions and how they inform the everyday reality and the experiences of ageing and of the self are critical concerns in this thesis. My approach to the ageing self is one that privileges narrativity and temporality as key constitutive elements and which considers the potentially different position of older people in relation to time and to the self. Growing older is a complicated mixture of bodily and social change, and negotiating these shifts has crucial implications for one's sense of self and subjectivity. While "old age" is a category which is readily used in daily discourse and living, what old age is and who is old nevertheless resists anchoring. What old age, being old and ageing meant to my research participants are key questions in order to understand the experience of growing older in Dodworth. Throughout the thesis, I focus on the dialectics of interpersonal interactions in order to speak meaningfully about how the experience of old age is organised and constructed. Emerging in tandem with these issues is another major topic of this thesis: social memory. Talk in Dodworth about places, absences, and relations continually brought the past and present together and was involved in how a sense of self is created. What emerged was a three-dimensionality of memory, an individual and collective way of placing oneself and others in relation to spatial aspects of the villagescape.