The Healthy Ancestor

"Professor McMullin offers a complex and subtle analysis of the intimate relationships among health, cultural identity, and disparities in medical access. Drawing on Native Hawaiian samples in both Hawai'i and Southern California, she provides unique comparative insights into the health perspectives of Hawaiians on and off the Islands. Tackling the difficult issue of what constitutes health as something that goes beyond the mere absence of disease, she argues for health as a sense of well-being that includes not only people's physical and mental condition, but also their culture. And with Hawaiians, culture is not merely a set of shared and negotiated patterns of interpretations and meanings; rather, it is grounded in their relationship to malama 'aina, or the care of the land of Hawai'i which embodies the people, their culture and their well-being regardless of where they are located." --Karen L. Ito, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and author of Lady Friends: Hawaiian Ways and the Ties that Define "The Healthy Ancestor is an exciting new contribution to Pacific studies and critical medical anthropology. This impressively detailed study reveals the vital connections between Hawaiian concepts of 'health' and cultural identity. Taking the reader on a journey into Hawaiian history, then to contemporary Hawai'i and the 'off-island' population in California, McMullin convincingly demonstrates the political and economic implications of health inequalities and the need to recontextualise concepts of health within cultural knowledge and Hawaiian identity."- Helen Lee, LaTrobe University, Australia, and author of Tongans Overseas: Between Two Shores