title: Cultural interpretations of an emerging health problem: blood pressure in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
abstract: This paper examines how a lower middle class community in an urban quarter of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania experiences the relatively new health problem of high blood pressure. Unlike previous research that focused on cultural risk factors or attempted to extract cultural models of hypertension, our study contributes to the growing body of literature that examines illness experience as a representation or embodiment of social suffering. The participants in this study use the local expressions 'BP' or 'presha' (from blood pressure) to refer to an illness that overlaps but is not synonymous with the biomedical conception of hypertension. The local concepts draw on biomedical notions of hypertension and, in addition, incorporate a range of afflictions into the symptomatology and aetiology that mirror their experiences of an increasingly harsh urban life. The concept of 'BP', therefore, is not bound to the body in a medical sense. As a broader and more complex syndrome, 'BP' is a somatic expression of emotional distress that links the body with the lived experience in this urban setting. Our approach of analysing cultural interpretations of 'BP' as an emerging health problem in this particular urban context calls for a more comprehensive response in diagnosis and treatment.
authors.affiliation: a Institute of Anthropology, University of Basel, Switzerland/Institute of Anthropology, University of Freiburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Hilde
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Strahl