Living and Dying the Contemporary World: A Compendium. Veena Das and Clara Han, eds., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 896 pp (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lived Lives and Social Suffering: Problems and Concerns in Medical Anthropology
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1998
W ar, violence, and repression remain a way of life for many women, men, and children in the world today. The articles in this special issue of MAQ relate poignant stories of violence and suffering in multiple geographical and cultural locations including Nicaragua, Palestine, Mozambique, Tibet, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. These articles focus on examining the meanings and complexities of the lived experience of repression and terror and reveal the extraordinary and subtle means by which people subvert, contest, and appropriate violence. They also question the common perception that political violence and repression operate in the same way everywhere. Medical anthropologists have begun to pay closer attention to war, conflict, and human aggression and also to how everyday forms of violence and suffering (Das 1996; Farmer 1996; Kleinman 1996; Scheper-Hughes 1992, 1996) structure people's everyday reality and social relations. As a collective effort, the articles presented here pay close attention to quotidian life-the humble, familiar, and mundane aspects of everyday experience, what Henri Lefebvre (1991) has called the "revolution of everyday life." In doing so, these articles reveal not only the suffering and alienation that violence and warfare produce, but also the human possibilities that violence and warfare engender. This human potential is optimistically demonstrated in Carolyn Nordstrom's article about the recent war in Mozambique, which illuminates the creative ways in which people unmake violence. And it is tragically described in Linda Pitcher's portrayal of the intentional death of the Palestinian shaheed, or martyr. Bodies and Embodiment Although medical anthropology has long been concerned with the physical and emotional suffering of the body that results from illness, disease, and death, the
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.
Phenomenological Approaches for Medical Anthropology: Toward a Critical Phenomenology
What does it mean to take a phenomenological approach in anthropology? In this class, we will examine contemporary ethnography that seeks to describe and theorize lived experience, with particular attention to sensory perception, subjectivity, and inter-subjectivity. We will also look into the philosophical tracts that inspire such work, as well as the historical contexts in which those philosophies arose.
Anthropological Reflections on Medicalization
Journal of the European Institut for Multidisciplinary Studies on Human Rights & Science , 2019
We can study pain, chronic diseases and death from different angles to the biomedical model, to the perspectives and models of psychology, to palliative and terminal care, and even more, to the branch of medicine that scientifically studies pain and its treatment, algology. ES | Abstract: Podemos estudiar el dolor, las enfermedades crónicas y la muerte desde ángulos distintos al modelo biomédico, a las perspectivas y modelos de la psicología, a los cuidados paliativos y los cuidados terminales, y más aún, a la rama de la medicina que estudia de forma científica el dolor y su tratamiento, la algología.
This course introduces students to the central concepts and methods of medical anthropology. Drawing on a number of classic and contemporary texts, we will consider both the specificity of local medical cultures and the processes which increasingly link these systems of knowledge and practice. We will study the social and political economic shaping of illness and suffering and will examine medical and healing systems – including biomedicine – as social institutions and as sources of epistemological authority. Topics covered will include the problem of belief; local theories of disease causation and healing efficacy; the placebo effect and contextual healing; theories of embodiment; medicalization; structural violence; modernity and the distribution of risk; the meanings and effects of new medical technologies; and global health.
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.
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.
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.