Series Foreword
Lenore Manderson2021, The Devil's Fruit
Medical Anthropology: Health, In equality, and Social Justice aims to capture the diversity of con temporary medical anthropological research and writing. The beauty of ethnography is its capacity, through storytelling, to make sense of suffering as a social experience, and to set it in context. Central to our focus in this series, therefore, is the way in which social structures, po liti cal and economic systems and ideologies shape the likelihood and impact of infections, injuries, bodily ruptures and disease, chronic conditions and disability, treatment and care, social repair, and death. Health and illness are social facts; the circumstances of the maintenance and loss of health are always and everywhere shaped by structural, local, and global relations. Social formations and relations, culture, economy, and po liti cal organization, as much as ecol ogy, shape the variance of illness, disability, and disadvantage. The authors of the monographs in this series are concerned centrally with health and illness, healing practices, and access to care, but in each case they highlight the importance of such differences in context as expressed and experienced at individual, house hold, and wider levels: health risks and outcomes of social structure and house hold economy, health systems factors, and national and global politics and economics all shape people's lives. In their accounts of health, in equality, and social justice, the authors move across social circumstances, health conditions, and geography, and their intersections and interactions, to demonstrate how individuals, communities, and states manage assaults on people's health and well-being. As medical anthropologists have long illustrated, the relationships of social context and health status are complex. In addressing these questions, the authors in this series showcase the theoretical sophistication, methodological rigor, and empirical richness of the field while expanding a map of illness, social interaction, and institutional life to illustrate the effects of material conditions and social meanings in troubling and surprising ways. The books reflect medical anthropology as a constantly changing field of scholarship, drawing on diverse research in residential and virtual communities, clinics and laboratories, emergency care, and public health settings; with ser vice providers, individual healers, and house holds; and with social bodies, human bodies, and biologies. While medical anthropology once concentrated on systems of healing, par tic u lar diseases, and embodied experiences, today the field has expanded to include environmental disaster, war, science, technology, faith, gender-based vio lence, and forced
