The Cultural, Social, and Public Health Context for Neuropsychological Practice
Cultural Context
Africa is the second largest and second most populated continent in the world. Besides the languages introduced by European colonizers (i.e., English, French, and Portuguese), the number of indigenous regional, ethnic, and tribal languages is currently estimated at 2,035 (Heine and Nurse 2000), and new ones are continuously being recognized and discovered. Traditional African societies heavily utilized an oral, rather than the more Western, written tradition, for transmitting information across generations. African societies are communitarian in nature, placing greater emphasis on the family and community than on the individual (i.e., a focus on “we” rather than “I”). This makes for a tightly knit family structure which assumes broad responsibility for the welfare of each family member. For example, in many traditional societies, following the loss of a male head of the household, the...
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Hill-Jarrett, T.G., Ikanga, J., Stringer, A.Y. (2017). Neuropsychology in Africa. In: Kreutzer, J., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56782-2_9170-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56782-2_9170-1
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