Territorial health maps
Introduction
Health cartographies comprise different forms of expression to understand and make visible a heterotopic reality in the field of health. They are made up of various planes that overlap and interact, generating undirected, unexplored and invisible connections to the apparent eye, bringing them to light. Thus, these cartographies seek to represent or embody health, not only as the absence of disease, but as a means of dynamic balance, as a liminal state or threshold state, which seeks balance in the midst of an environment of permanent difficulty or adversity, of conflicts and irresolutions, of any kind, whether physiological, sociopolitical or ecological.
These cartographies thus encompass all those representational operations that build a comprehensive-transformative and non-cumulative means of knowledge, with the intention of accounting for a new social, environmental and technological scenario, not adhering to a specific format, walking transversally through different scales, supports and establishing an open source self-representation system (participatory and participatory) in its gestation.
They range from the realm of the anonymous, the living space, the family, personal care, to the most collective or global, always with an intentional desire to give representation to the margins, to the minor, to the detailed. Therefore, in their eagerness to materialize the invisible or the inapparent of a system (physiological or ecological), health cartographies acquire a political commitment. Starting from this background, the term cartographies of health proposes a redefinition of the representativeness of health, positioning itself in a specific way with respect to the two fields that make up the term.
Background for a definition
Contenido
Las cartografías que tratan de representar aspectos relacionados con la salud se han servido de las mismas técnicas, formatos y políticas de poder que el resto de las representaciones cartográficas de otros campos del conocimiento. Apareciendo a lo largo de la historia, en todas las culturas, la documentación cartográfica en materia de salud ha sido testigo de enfoques sistémicos o neguentrópicos basados en las relaciones primigenias de las comunidades con la naturaleza y lo vivo, que aún se conservan parcialmente (como es el caso de algunas culturas indígenas de Latinoamérica), hasta enfoques más nomotéticos en los llamados métodos geográficos en las ciencias de la salud y en los mapeados elaborados en determinados contextos y sociedades con el fin de ser empleados como herramientas de control y estudio de enfermedades,[1] descubrimientos geográficos, pandemias; hasta llegar incluso a ejemplos actuales más globales, como los mapas de control de la pandemia COVID-19.