Wrangling for health: Moving beyond ‘tinkering’ to struggling against the odds

This article proposes and outlines a new metaphor – ‘wrangling for health’– to think about the health seeking efforts occurring within the complex and exhausting everyday realities of resource-poor communities. It draws on fieldwork carried out in a rural community in Sri Lanka (in 2019) with the aim of generating data on the therapeutic practices and health seeking activities of 20 households in the face of everyday ill-health matters. For people in such resource-poor communities, achieving a ‘good’ health outcome(s) means a constant and ongoing struggle against the challenges of a low-income household, inhospitable healthcare settings and a diverse therapeutic landscape. Based on my findings, I present four key trends in this struggle: a) negotiating the costs and economies of healthcare, b) seeking treatment only as a desperate measure, c) navigating the diverse therapeutic alternatives and d) circumventing the system. These give a glimpse into the ongoing and painstaking efforts by which people creatively mobilise and manipulate whatever resources accessible to them, balance the pros and cons of potential outcome(s) and persevere courageously against adverse circumstances. As such, the struggle for health mirrors their ongoing struggle to ‘tie it up together’ or wrangle it in everyday life (“jeewithaya gatagaha-gannava”). Wrangling for health – in its sense of struggling against the odds – is therefore proposed as a metaphor for health engagements that challenge the notion of ‘tinkering’ (Mol, 2008; Mol et al., 2015) so as to depict more accurately the broad range of health seeking efforts that occur within the diverse healthcare landscapes around the world.