“Carpentry work is always bad for health”: Background information and anthropological contributions to the study of the health-disease processes of construction workers

Abstract

This article presents an approach to the study of the health-disease processes of construction workers in the city of Rosario. Characterized as a very heterogeneous, precarious and dangerous industry, the specialized bibliography confers a centrality to risks and accidents, as well as to safety and prevention. The predominance of Engineering and Medicine in the state of play reveals a certain medical-technical configuration of the problem that focuses on the individual and the biological, reproducing and transferring the conception of the dominant medical model to the workplace. This perspective has been questioned in Latin America since the 70s, mainly by Social Medicine, which also nurtured a number of anthropological approaches and shaped a theoretical arsenal that still today remains fundamental for an anthropology of health-disease processes in male and female workers.

In this paper we summarize the prevailing studies in the field of health in construction, the contributions made from anthropology to the problem of workers’ health will be specified, and some analytical reflections will be shown as a result of an ethnographic study carried out in two construction sites in the city of Rosario between 2009 and 2019.