Medicine Health and Culture (2020 version)

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.

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.

2009

Even though the issue of empathy is widely debated in disciplines such as ethnology and medicine, ethnologists' relationship with their informants cannot be likened to that of doctors and their patients. Likewise, the empathic dimension, considered to characterize the relationship in both cases, is not the same. In this article examples drawn from various case studies are used in a cross-cutting analysis of the nature and role of empathy in the contexts of medical and ethnological relationships. The part that empathy plays in the production of knowledge, in both types of relationship, is evaluated. What are the implications of empathy as regards the medical doctor's work and that of the ethnologist, and what is its heuristic value? In other words, what link is there between empathy and the knowledge production process? I show that even though empathy may be useful in both types of situation, ethnologists can derive a benefit from it only if, unlike doctors, they are able to control it and to distance themselves from it.

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.

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.

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?

2017

This chapter reviews the contributions of ethnoscience to medical anthropology, focusing on the study of illness beliefs and practices across cultures. The chapter‟s approach is broadly historical. It starts by describing the early cognitive anthropological research on illness that explored taxonomies of illness concepts, and the features of those concepts as linguistic phenomena. It then surveys more recent work on prototypes and schema theory, drawing connections to ethnomedical beliefs and practices. Finally, it discusses the modern concept of “explanatory models,” and relates it to issues in cognitive anthropology. Since “ethnoscience” is a concept that emerged from, and has been explored within cognitive anthropology, this chapter foregrounds the cognitive science agendas that intersect with the research and practical concerns of medical anthropology, and does not attempt to provide a widely comprehensive overview of either ethnoscience or medical anthropology.

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...