Aspects of Applied Medical Anthropology syllabus (2016)

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.

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.

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.

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 cross-cultural 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, 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 methods, social theory, and health-related practice.

Health, Culture and Society, 2010

The essays in this volume consider what medical anthropology means in the academy and outside of it. Written by a diverse group of anthropologists, some of whom also work as doctors, public health workers, and NGO staff members, the essays share personal insights on how they used anthropology to solve health problems and improve interventions. Several of the contributors draw on their own illness experiences to reconsider the health challenges they have previously sought to understand, analyse, and document. Other essays come from authors who have struggled to incorporate anthropological methodologies and perspectives in multi-disciplinary research and medical relief work. Also included are essays from professional anthropologists who reflect on the value of their discipline’s mission and methodology. This collection demonstrates how anthropology is used in policy and health interventions and attempts to bridge the gaps between policymakers, clinicians, NGO workers, doctors, and aca...

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.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2009

The flow of international aid from wealthier to poorer countries has increased dramatically over the last decade. This is attributable in part to the efforts of health activists, including medical anthropologists, who have rendered bare the realities of health disparities and human suffering. We are now facing an unprecedented moment in the history of global health, in which infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis are no longer peripheral concerns but primary targets of bilateral aid programs, philanthropy, and research. Emergent health problems range from antibiotic resistance to tobacco use to SARS and avian flu to the flow of health professionals from developing to developed countries. These problems demand global solutions, challenge the internal sovereignty of nation states, and involve new sets of actors, networks, partnerships, and transnational health initiatives.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2008

... Global Social Policy 8(1):80–108. CrossRef. Kamat, Sangeeta 2003 The NGO Phenomenon and Political Culture in the Third World. Development 46(1):88–93. CrossRef. Kamat, Sangeeta 2004 The Privatization of Public Interest: Theorizing NGO Discourse in a Neoliberal Era. ...

Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2017

describe anthropological engagements with the global public health enterprise that we could not have imagined in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when my coeditors and I were developing the ideas that led to the publication of Anthropology and Epidemiology (Janes, Stall, and Gifford 1986). Medical anthropology was a young field and we were amongst the first few cohorts of students to receive PhDs in it. Many of us had been motivated to consider anthropological contributions to public health through the mentorship of Fred Dunn, a physician-anthropologistepidemiologist who was deeply committed to the utility of medical anthropology in communicable disease epidemiology (Inhorn and Janes 2007). The exploration of the social contexts of sickness was not, of course, a novel line of thinking: in many ways we were simply building on genealogies of knowledge that harkened back to the work of Rudolf Virchow, Friedrich Engels, Emile Durkheim, and others (Trostle 1986b, 1986a). Exemplary thinking had already been done by Sidney Kark and his colleagues and students in South Africa, which in many ways laid the foundation for the development of an anthropologically informed social epidemiology (see Kark and Abramson 2003); Alexander and Dorothea Leighton and their colleagues in their often-neglected work on the social and cultural factors