Social Factors of Health Vulnerability of Marginalized Social Groups

Abstract

Marginalized social groups are part of a certain apotheosis of otherness in present-day anthropological studies, being groups – such as refugees or immigrants – that come from other socio-cultural environments, and are marginalized in the anthropologists’ own environments, or environments socio-culturally similar to these. Groups that are to be considered as marginalized are those that have been put in this position contextually, through displacement from everything that represents life according to human standards, which becomes a continuous/permanent state, i.e. the way of life of the people in question, leading to the destabilization of both their physical and their mental health. The causes of this displacement are social in nature, thus constituting the primary social factors of health vulnerability of displaced populations, and they include wars and armed conflicts, persecution for various reasons, and poverty, i.e. the impossibility of subsisting on resources available in one’s own socio-economic environment. The secondary social factors of health vulnerability of marginalized social groups occur in the environments in which the groups find themselves after having been displaced from their previous socio-cultural environments; they result from the legal status of unwilling newcomers to these environments, and refer to the difficulty or impossibility of accessing the social and health care systems in their new environments.

Keywords

• anthropological studies of marginal and marginalized social groups
• anthropology and the public health care system
• social exclusion
• stigma
• refugees
• internally displaced persons