On how much one can take: relocating exploitation and exclusion within the broader framework of allostatic load theory.

摘要

The aim of this short report is to share with the readers of Health & Place the far-reaching opportunities open to medical geographical scholarship by the integrated model of allostasis, a major advance in psychological science that has just been published in Psychological Review (Ganzel et al., 2010), the discipline's most prestigious journal. To be sure, the aforementioned paper is just the latest, most comprehensive original synthesis of a research effort launched in the first decades1 of the 20th century by Walter Cannon and Hans Selye and sustained ever since in a broad range of academic disciplines (cf. McEwen, 1998; Peek et al., 20102). I focus on this paper alone because it provides a state-of-the-art conceptual integration of the findings across all the areas of stress research, and especially because it brings together the latest developments in the rapidly expanding fields of human neuroscience and genetics with key concepts from stress models from the medical sciences and the social sciences. Furthermore, as already suggested by the title of this report, Ganzel et al.'s integrated model of allostasis provides us with a unified conceptual apparatus for analysing phenomena of medical geographical interest such as exploitation and exclusion that at present tend to be investigated in a somewhat disconnected manner, from theoretical standpoints (Marxism, poststructuralism) that are often at odds with each other.I begin by outlining the gist of this novel account, and then, building on this minimalist platform, continue with a forward-looking exploration of the impact and significance this new theoretical lens could and should have for the future trajectory of medical and health geography.