Critical epidemiology and dispossession of lands and territories: A theoretical reflection

Abstract

Introduction: Critical epidemiology, as an epistemic proposal for understanding health processes, artic-ulates a conceptual and instrumental system that allows explaining how health and disease are socially determined. In the case of the rural population, the impact of geopolitical phenomena such as land grabbing and dispossession of lands and territories is a determinant of their health-disease processes. Throughout this article of theoretical reflection, a series of approaches and categories proposed by Jaime Breilh, who has pioneered the subject, is presented and their potential to explain the incidence of these phenomena in the modification of ways of live and the health situation of the rural population. Development: Some substantial components of critical epidemiology in relation to their theoretical and methodological relevance to analyze land dispossession and health processes are the presence of the social in epidemiology; the procedural and spatial-temporal dimension; the macro and the micro: unity and hierarchy; protective and destructive health processes, and the concept of society-nature metabo-lism. Conclusions: The dispossession of land in Colombia has been of great magnitude, and its resolution is considered a central issue for the construction of post-conflict peace. From the theoretical framework of critical epidemiology, it is possible to carry out research to address the incidence of dispossession and the grabbing of lands and territories, in the collective health situation of the rural population. This type of approach has had little development in the country and becomes important in the current context, where growing extractivism threatens the vital processes of agrarian communities.