The Importance Of Inequality To People

Inequalities are something that we acknowledge; we know about the different types of inequalities, we see them happen every day and we might have experience them at first hand. In this essay, I will discuss how different focuses on the social and the cultural can help us to understand why inequalities are important or not to people. I will use three ethnographies where inequality is a primarily discussed topic. In the first two, I will address why inequality do not matter to people and reflect on how this is criticised by the authors of the ethnographies by saying that inequalities should definitely matter; and in the third one I will look at an example linked to how inequality is taken seriously and sort of becomes a reason to look for social

Scheper-Hughes (1988) looks at the sickness known as ‘nervos’ affecting the people of the community of Bom Jesus in Brazil. She argues how an illness that was undoubtedly the result of severe hunger ended up being medicalised and categorised as something that could be simply treated with pills, instead of giving the affected people with what they really needed. She emphasises that the cause of this is the social and economic inequalities that the Brazilian society had at that time, because this led people to be unable to afford food and live under decent living conditions even though they worked all day (Scheper-Hughes, 1988). It seems like in this case, instead of trying to solve the problem of inequality being caused by the unfair treatment given to a particular part of the population, the problem was assumed to be internalised as a sickness that needed to be

In this ethnography, Alex Edmonds (2010) looks at plastic surgery in Brazil, where this is a commonly encouraged activity to do, especially for poor people who are looking for some social, economic recognition. He argues that even though plastic surgery is seemed as superficial, it does not mean that it should not be taken seriously because for people in Brazil it is important to look beautiful to gain social status and get jobs up to the point where plastic surgery is offered in public hospitals (Edmonds, 2010). It seems clear that in this ethnography, cosmetic surgery is analysed as a tool that has helped people to achieve the desire to be socially seen from another perspective. Cosmetic surgery has brought people the opportunity to tackle the social inequality that categorises them under a certain status. Therefore, it could be said that inequalities do matter to people (or at least creates awareness) as long as they affect them negatively. The poor saw in getting plastic surgery a chance to be more socially accepted, or sort of equal to others in terms or having the same