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12 257 Introduction to Medical Anthropology
2017
Medical anthropology involves up-close, person-centered, and ethically engaged examination of the complex cultural dynamics that underpin and give rise not only to health and wellbeing, illness and death, but also the medical systems on which we rely for treatment and cure. This introductory course will first discuss the history and development of medical anthropology as a sub-discipline of sociocultural anthropology. We will briefly explore the multiple directions that medical anthropology has taken since its inception, and the interdisciplinary approaches, concepts, and theories so central to contemporary anthropologists’ research, outreach, and activism. We will also discuss the field-based methods used by medical anthropologists – and ethnographers in particular – to investigate how cultural forces shape issues of health, illness, and medicine. The course will next focus on recent theoretical and ethnographic developments, such as the evolution of meaning-centered and critical medical anthropology approaches. Special attention will be paid to anthropologists’ efforts to explore how bodies, health and illness, and also medical services and systems are at the nexus of – and bear the effects of - intersecting neoliberal and capitalistic forces. In addressing the ways that social, political, and economic systems give rise to health (in)equity and (in)justice, we will gain insights to the socially important and applied ways that ethnography pulls into view otherwise obscured or invisible experiences, and the forms of suffering and signs of hope these entail. To this end, we will work together to review critical theories and ethnographic case studies of health and medicine in North America and around the world.
Beyond the Limits: Medicine, Healing, and Medical Anthropology
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2023
This collection contemplates that which resides at the limits of the anthropology of health and medicine. By "limit," we mean that "outside which there is nothing to be found" and "inside of which everything is to be found" (de la Cadena 2015: 14, citing Ranajit Guha 2002: 7). Our work takes place within many kinds of limits: epistemological frameworks, ethical and moral commitments, disciplinary norms, ontological certainties, political economies, writing conventions, and the ends of life, to name a few. In this collection of essays and accompanying conversations, we consider how medicine and health are performed in ways that appear beyond such limits—as impossible, unreal, unscientific, irresponsible, unthinkable, nonacademic, non-replicable, fictitious, unethical, unruly, or untrue—but which, nonetheless, are. In so doing, this collection moves toward the speculative to examine the potential it holds for displacing our sedimented ways of thinking and producing knowledge in and about medicine, health, and healing. Our speculative orientation draws on and augments broader anthropological interventions that experiment with doing, thinking, and writing otherwise.
Critically Applied Medical Anthropology
This course provides an overview of critically applied medical anthropology – the examination of the social origins of vulnerability, the role of structures of power in its social reproduction, and critical praxis in responding to it. We will explore the major theoretical lenses within medical anthropology with a particular focus on how medical anthropologists theorize the relationship between culture, structural violence, and health. We will consider its position within the broader discipline, with a particular focus on debates over its applied dimensions and radical alternatives related to those dimensions. In this course, you will gain ways to utilize ethnographic, anthropological, and qualitative data in health-related fields including advocacy and organizing, program evaluation and needs assessments, and health care delivery. You will gain critical skills in evaluating the adequacy and validity of formulations about “culture” and “tradition” in health programs and research, examine emic perceptions of disease, and consider the ways in which western science and biomedicine are themselves cultural constructs. You will become familiar with a range of work on culture and health, domestically and internationally. You will acquire skills in utilizing data about culture and health at macro- and micro- levels.
The interface between medical anthropology and medical ethnobiology
Journal of the Royal Anthropological …, 2006
Medical anthropology is concerned with both the causes and consequences of human sickness, and its various theoretical orientations can be grouped into four major approaches: medical ecology, critical medical anthropology, interpretative medical anthropology, and ethnomedicine. While medical anthropologists of all theoretical persuasions have examined why people get sick, the analysis and understanding of patterns of treatment has been largely confined to ethnomedicine. Historically, more emphasis has been placed on the personalistic or supernatural aspects of ethnomedical systems than on naturalistic or empirical components. While this focus has produced valuable insights into the role of ritual and belief in healing, it has led to the impression that traditional medicine is primarily symbolic. Moreover, it ignores the theoretical bases of traditional healing strategies and the practical means by which most of the world heals itself, namely plants. Recently there has been more interest in the empirical character of ethnomedical systems, and in this paper we consider the role that medical ethnobiology has played in this shift of focus. We begin with a brief history of medical anthropology to illuminate why naturalistic medicine was neglected for so long. We then review exemplary research in two areas of medical ethnobiology -ethnophysiology and medical ethnobotany -that address the study of naturalistic aspects of medical systems. We conclude with suggestions for future research at the interface between medical ethnobiology and medical anthropology that will contribute to both fields.
Health, Illness, and Healing: An Overview in Medical Anthropology
American Journal of Ethnomedicine, 2022
It is a mentionable fact that, health, illness and healing are considered as a ubiquitous nexus in the holistic study of health system under the purview of Medical Anthropology. The socio-cultural dimension of health is viewed cross culturally in the study of ethno medicine in the present day. The ethnic communities as the mainstay of the unit of study in medical anthropology have to be observed with special emphasis on the ethno pharmacy along with some of the interdisciplinary domains. The present research article is an overview of the holistic aspects of health system and its different parameters in a nutshell.
Introduction to Medical Anthropology - ANTH 134 - Summer 2018
2018
In this course, we explore the cultural and historical specificity of what appear to be biological givens, drawing from a variety of anthropological questions, theoretical approaches, and research techniques. We begin by examining the experience of illness and how understandings of disease and health are affected by - and in turn influence - social, cultural, and political concerns. We will approach biomedicine as one of many culturally produced medical systems, comparing ways of seeing and knowing across traditions and exploring the power of medicine to act as a form of social control. Finally, we will examine how local and global inequalities produce contemporary suffering and the role that anthropology might play in efforts to achieve greater health equity.
In this course, students will be encouraged to develop a broad understanding of medical anthropology, one of the newest, largest, and fastest growing subfields of cultural anthropology. Drawing from theoretical and ethnographic material and from detailed case studies from the U.S., Haiti, Peru, and Guatemala, we will examine a number of topics in medical anthropology, including applied, interpretive, and critical medical anthropological approaches and practices. Through reading and evaluating a wide range of both classical and contemporary publications in medical anthropology, we will explore the different kinds of questions that medical anthropologists ask, the research methods they use to answer those questions, and the insights (theoretical, moral, and practical) that these insights provide. Throughout the course, our discussions will focus on how people from different societies and cultures understand health, illness, and healing, including studying different cultural healing practices and beliefs as well as the social origins and consequences of illness and disease. Questions we will investigate together include: How do cultures and societies interact with people’s physical environments to cause health problems and/or influence the spread of illness and disease? How do economic and political structures and inequalities help shape people’s health, their access to quality health care, and the distribution of illness and disease within and across different societies? How do people in different cultures and societies label, describe, and experience illness and offer meaningful responses to individual and communal distress?
Conceptually and methodologically, medical anthropology is well-positioned to support a "big-tent" research agenda on health and society. It fosters approaches to social and structural models of health and wellbeing in ways that are critically reflective, cross-cultural, people-centered, and transdisciplinary. In this review article, we showcase these four main characteristics of the field, as featured in Social Science & Medicine over the last fifty years, highlighting their relevance for an international and interdisciplinary readership. First, the practice of critical inquiry in ethnographies of health offers a deep appreciation of sociocultural viewpoints when recording and interpreting lived experiences and contested social worlds. Second, medical anthropology champions crosscultural breadth: it makes explicit local understandings of health experiences across different settings, using a fine-grained, comparative approach to develop a stronger global platform for the analysis of health-related concerns. Third, in offering people-centered views of the world, anthropology extends the reach of critical enquiry to the lived experiences of hard-to-reach population groups, their structural vulnerabilities, and social agency. Finally, in developing research at the nexus of cultures, societies, biologies, and health, medical anthropologists generate new, transdisciplinary conversations on the body, mind, person, community, environment, prevention, and therapy. As featured in this journal, scholarly contributions in medical anthropology seek to debate human health and wellbeing from many angles, pushing forward methodology, social theory, and health-related practice.
Aspects of Applied Medical Anthropology syllabus (2016)
To be confirmed How can what we know as anthropologists be applied to saving lives, alleviating suffering, and promoting vitality? This class surveys some answers to this question from the perspectives of medical anthropology and sister disciplines such as social medicine and global health. We will read and interrogate classic and contemporary studies from the anthropology and medical literatures, and policy documents from the World Health Organisation and philanthropic foundations. Along the way, we will engage with key theoretical approaches including Critical Medical Anthropology, political ecology, and the social determinants of health. The goal of the class is to equip students to critically evaluate and apply anthropological ideas to current problems in medicine and global health.