Representing Health: An Afrocentric Perspective from Ghana

Health and ill health are critical concepts in public health with far reaching socio-political implications. Notwithstanding, conceptualizing health has been challenging as there appears to be no definitional consensus. A related challenge is finding a sociologically, politically, spiritually, and culturally-sound cleavage between health as defined, and health as experienced in different settings. Scholars have attributed the lack of consensus to the complex and interdisciplinary nature of health. In this chapter, we build on the classic definition of health by the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide an Afrocentric perspective of the concept. While there have been several attempts to move away from the dominant biomedical foundations of health, an Afrocentric perspective is currently lacking in the health representation literature. We fill this important gap by using case studies that emphasize the African traditional notions of good health and illustrate how health is more than just the absence of disease in the living. The chapter begins with a review of concepts of health, then continues to provide a nuanced analysis of how both medical and indigenous African perspectives of health are important in the global representation of health.