members better manage their relationship with mainstream medical practitioners and sponsored research and evaluation studies to document the CWC’s model. The Invisible College conducted educational and support group activities for a wide segment of the CWC’s constituency, including patients and medical doctors, to help them understand the interface between health and culture and regenerate these connections in their personal and community lives. Core Member Activities included basic member services considered fundamental to cultural wellness, including, for example, health self-assessments, introductory courses in cultural health issues, and nutritional and exercise classes.
Although the CWC’s underlying program philosophy will be discussed in much greater detail later in this study, it maintained that to build healthy pluralistic communities, people must be reconnected to their specific cultural traditions. Thus, reflecting its dual mission, the three CWC program divisions also operated at two levels. There were general classes which would be of interest to any constituent, for example, health self-assessments, relaxation techniques, and a farmer’s market. And there were constituent-specific classes, for example, parenting classes for African Americans, leadership classes for women, Hmong dance, English as a Second Language classes for Chicanos and Latinos, European traditional healing, or cultural health sessions for medical doctors.4
Two subtle philosophical distinctions also characterized the CWC mission. Its general mission and programs applied to all participants, regardless of ethnocultural, educational, or occupational background. At the same time, according to the CWC’s African leadership, its cultural wellness mission, although universal, had an essentially African base. Therefore, “African” at the CWC was construed as both an ethnocultural category referring to people of African descent, and a universal cultural wellness philosophy and way of life that could be adopted by anyone regardless of their background.5
A thorough study of the CWC’s mission, program tracks, and profound constituent diversity was not feasible in the context of this two-year study. This study focuses on the CWC’s role in the construction of African diasporan diversity in the Twin Cities. Given my training as an Africanist and my ethnographic research experiences in African communities in Nigeria and African diasporan ones in the United States, an African diasporan focus seems appropriate. This focus in no way implies that I consider the CWC’s African constituents more important than other participants. Nor does it imply, as indicated by the many general and culturally specific services available to its non-African participants (see Table A6 in Appendix A), that this nonprofit organization only has African programs. The African diasporan focus is driven by the need to delineate a manageable focus for a two-year ethnographic research project, my own training, and my related interest in African diasporan studies issues. Interrelations between CWC Africans and other participants are studied to the extent that it helps to inform African diversity dynamics.
The CWC was formed in 1997 as a spin-off of a foundation-funded demonstration project called here the Cultural Health Initiative (CHI).6 The healthcare foundation supported the CHI for two years (from 1995 to 1996) as an experiment to see if a grassroots approach to health care could reverse the high incidences of infant deaths, hypertension, diabetes, homicide, and other lifestyle-related ailments that plague this community. CHI convened several community-based committees called “Citizen Health Action Teams,” or CHATs, which met during this formative stage to design a community-based health center. CHATs focused on both culturally specific issues—for example, defining an African philosophy for health and wellness—and general concerns such as defining a healthy person and community. CHATs represented the diversity of the CWC’s Powderhorn constituency. The goal of these CHAT meetings was to design a health center in which all Powderhorn people felt some sense of ownership. Although staff and volunteers elaborated and refined programs during this research, these formative CHAT proceedings defined all of the cultural wellness approaches described and analyzed in this study, including the CWC’s mission, its program design, spatial philosophy and layout, and what it called “the people theory,” a grassroots model of health and wellness, as well as related program principles and strategies.
In addition to describing the official program and mission of the CWC, this study also uses ethnographic methods to explicate the underlying folk theories of health, wellness, and identity that inform the CWC’s public discourse. While the CWC was a grassroots organization, its mission and programs, of course, evolved within a broader set of power relations. This study describes how the wider sociopolitical climate and CWC African diversity dynamics mutually inform each other.
As a comparatively new and relatively small-budget nonprofit organization, the CWC had a full-time, all female staff of only six people and ten to fifteen part-time instructors (mostly women with about five men) who taught specialty classes (for example, African dance and other classes featured in this study) on either a pro bono or contractual basis. Staff positions included an executive director, a medical director (who was also a physician), an office manager, two cultural healers (who were also licensed social workers), and an administrative assistant (who was also a cultural healer).7 As is typical of tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, the CWC had a volunteer board which set program policy. The CWC also housed self-help groups from various communities, for example, a Laotian women’s support group, which had sources of funding independent of the CWC but, in exchange for helping to pay rent and other expenses, may have utilized office equipment, participated in other CWC programs, and/or received general CWC administrative services such as accounting and fiscal agency for foundation grants.8 Augmenting the capacity of its full-time staff, board, and part-time instructors was a large network of special-project volunteers from the community, for example, members of CHATs, medical doctors, and other professionals who were members of advisory committees, such as an evaluation committee and a health and wellness policy committee. These committees also shaped CWC program direction. The staff, board, and volunteers reflected the ethnocultural diversity of the Powderhorn community where the CWC was based. Although the majority of board and special-project volunteers were women, there were significant numbers of men working in these capacities.9 Thus, the CWC, through its volunteer network, had an effective reach and capacity that extended far beyond its small staff.10
Anthropologists have been criticized for focusing their studies on disenfranchised populations and exhorted to “study up,” that is, include those who hold power in their research for a more complete understanding of the formation and operation of sociopolitical and cultural systems (Weatherford 1985; Herzfeld 1987). It became evident early in the research that although the CWC focused on the Powderhorn planning district, which included several of the poorest neighborhoods in the Twin Cities region, it worked across a diverse social network that brought together, in sometimes very direct ways, some of the metropolitan area’s poorest residents with the region’s most powerful people, who included foundation funders, wealthy donors, politicians, and public servants. As I better understood the socioeconomic background of the CWC’s African participants, it became clear that although they were working with low-income constituents, the leadership which organized and implemented CWC programs and related efforts would probably be classified by most people as middle class.
One of the many challenges of this study was that I initially set out to understand the broader dynamics of identity and community formation among people of African descent, inclusive of diverse class backgrounds. However, including a broad sample of class backgrounds, particularly among African immigrants, proved difficult. The most active CWC participants tended to be well-educated people who were fluent in both their native language (often in addition to at least one other African and/or European language) and English. They tended to be more established immigrants who had some post-secondary education, professional careers, and had lived in the United States for at least five years. However, there seemed to be more class variation among African American participants than their African counterparts. For example, several African American participants in the CWC’s network held very prominent leadership positions in either the public, corporate, or nonprofit sectors. I did not meet any African participants who held such positions. This was probably a function of their status as
