Nordic Journal of Nursing Research

The aim of this article is to describe culturally congruent nursing care focussing on the experiences of a foreign woman in the Danish health care system. Care is described as the essence of nursing and in the perspective of cultural care theory it is shown how unknown or vaguely known phenomena, such as ‘shame’, can be discovered in the lifehistory.

Treatment of torture survivors from foreign cultures is a relatively new challenge to nurses. A brief general description of torture after-effects is given in order to understand the invented examples which describe a number of possibilities and difficulties af assuring relevant care of torture survivors. The necessity of deeper knowledge about other cultural health and illness concepts is stressed in order to create common understanding between nurses and patients. Thus, a need for further knowledge of your own culture emerges. The need of general awareness towards the observance of human rights is finally emphasized.

In the western countries, the conception of sickness has long been dominated by the biomedical tradition. In view of this, this article deals with culture-bound syndromes, not just as an exotic form of illness expression, but as something that exists in the western culture as well.

My material is based on working as a nurse in two nordic cultures, and my approach to the material is anthropological.

The article deals with daughters of immigrant families and their motherrole. It is based on interviews with seven women, and it describes how the meeting between two cultures has marked the women, who have grown up in Denmark. The article describes how they look on family traditions and what desires they have for their children.

The article seeks to pinpoint some reasons for misunderstandings and break-downs in the cross-cultural communication between health personnel and immigrant patients/clients. The deeper meaning of the conversation is underlined. It is only about prevention and/or disease and curing, but also about the whole relationship between Danes and the immigrants.

The article describes the cultural specific needs and resources causing different groups of elderly people to live through and experience a temporary illness and rehabilitation period differently. The theoretical basis for illustration of the cultural differences is the life form concept and the coping concept, as it is the purpose of the article to illustrate connections between life forms and ways of and potentials for coping.

Personal experience from my ethnographic fieldwork in an oncological ward in Denmark is the starting point for this article. This experience is used to describe the research methods of anthropology, which means fieldwork with participant-observation and ethnographic interviews. Just as the word participant-observation includes two parts, the method also includes two distinct processes of recognition. Through participation, the researcher familiarizes herself with the daily life of the explored, she becomes a part of her own data-collection material, and she becomes her own informant. Through observation, the researcher distances herself from what she sees and hears in the investigation field. The researcher always stands between her data and its interpretation, which means that the investigation field is always very loosely defined and selfdefining. This article shows that the characteristics of anthropology: a holistic perspective on the single cultural phenomenon and a transcultural perspective are not only reserved to studies of people from foreign cultures. They are also very useful in research projects about the nature of nursing.