AAA+'08+Abstract+-+Medical+Travel+and+theories+of+cultural+Intimacy+-+Rejected

"Medical Tourism" and Intimate Travel: Identities In Transnational Healthcare

Growing numbers of tourists travel not for the sun, but for a surgeon’s gloved hand and the practices that surround it. The outsourcing of healthcare delivery is referred to as ‘medical tourism’ (MT), though describing only one aspect of international travel for healthcare, it is increasingly influential. This expanding transnational phenomenon encompasses panoply of interactions between national cultures and individual identities across the globe. However media usage of the term “medical tourism” and subsequent adoption of the term in academic discourse has imposed limitations on what experiences are studied, and focused conversation on the travel of western patients to developing nations. Based on analysis of ethnographic material obtained from published accounts of MT participants, notably healthcare deliverers and recipients, this study aims to understand how they balance multiple demands, as well as examine the effect of the emergence of MT on preexisting systems and conceptions of care for the body. Media representations and the promotional industry has tended to re-inscribe historic roles and stereotypes for participants; descriptions by visiting patients and travel agents form an image of indigenous healthcare providers as caring and gentle with few accounts recording the voices of the indigenous. Departing from these conventional approaches, this paper attempts to elucidate ways in which participants knowingly mobilize and simultaneously resist orientalist stereotypes. For example, in ironic contrast with the dominant motivation for travel being financial need, tourists temporarily play roles of wealth in the milieu of destination cultures; while Philippine providers balance culturally intimate (Herzfeld) and public identities.