ANTHRCUL 244 Midterm Exam Flashcards
Agency
Control in one’s life, ability to determine and make meaning of one’s behavior.
Biomedicalization
A system which seeks to apply principles of the natural sciences (biology, biomechimsitry ) to practices of diagnosing disases and promoting health
Includes Infrasturcutres, people, beliefs/worldviews, policies
Biopower
A state’s control over and/or governance of life (of bodies). Involves frequent examination, definition of a norm, evaluation of bodies in comparison to that norm.
Colonialism
A form of imperialism where one country takes over another to exploit its people and material resources.
Imperialism is a government or nation state’s intention to control other countries and peoples through military or economic means.
Commodification
When something becomes salable when it was not previously.
Cultural Relativism
The principle of withholding judgement about seemingly strange or unfamiliar beliefs and practices.
Culturalism
“The assumption that culture is a unified entity and may be used to fully account for people’s behavior.”
Deliverance
Expelling a spirit from a person or a location; Exorcism
Disease
- Labeled by health specialist, doctor, healer.
- A condition in which an organ, bodily system, or physiological process has changed and/or is functioning abnormally.
- Focus on causations and predictions
- Ways of diagnosing and treating as a response to a cause.
DSM
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
- Subject to social construction/influence
Embodiment
“A concept referring to how we literally incorporate, biologically, the material and social world in which we live, from conception to death”.
- Relates to the idea that even if race isn’t biology, it can have biological effects.
Epidemic
A widespread outbreak, incidence of diseases beyond a typical expectancy for a region.
Ethnicity
“Group identity based on notions of similar and shared history, culture, and kinship.”
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is assuming that our own way of doing things is right, while dismissing the people’s practices or views as wrong, unnatural or ignorant.
Enculturation
The learning of a system or cultural context.
Essentialization
To reduce something to a basic, underlying essence.
Evidence-Based Medicine
“…the proactive and transparent application of the best published scientific
research findings about medical treatments.” (Kaufman)
- Also a form of social capital.
- Ex. Cholera
Explanatory Model of Illness
A meaning or explanation of what is happening to a patient. This can be given by the patient, their kin, a friend, or a healing practitioner, and will vary based on who explains what is happening.
Germ Theory
Theory that disease comes from microorganisms
Idiom of Distress
Way of expressing pain, identifying a bad situation, and communicating it to others (perhaps to elicit a supportive response).
Illness
- Perspective of the patient and their direct experience
- Subjective, felt understanding of the body
- Emphasis on symptoms, sensations, feelings
Imperialism
A government or nation state’s intention to control other countries and peoples through military or economic means.
Intersectionality
How societies treat people based on their various social and political identities, such as gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. It highlights how these identities interact to create unique patterns of oppression and privilege.
Kusamira
A set of practices, a form of mediumship and worship, a healing tradition.
The practice of mediumship and spirit possession through the ritual performance
Medicalization
Medicalization corresponds to the global expansion and hegemonic domination of the biomedical system.
A redefinition or reclassification separate from problematization.
Multiaxial Suffering
Multiple axes must be considered simultaneously when considering suffering
“Factors including gender, ethnicity (“race”), and socioeconomic status may each be shown to play a role in rendering individuals
and groups vulnerable to extreme human suffering… Simultaneous consideration of various social “axes” is imperative in efforts to discern a political economy of brutality.”
Pandemic
An occurence of dissease with simultaneous transmission occurring worldwide, crossing international boundaries.
Pentecostalism
- A Protestant movement within Christianity
- Emphasis on charismatic experiences of individuals centered around “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” kind of conversion experience marked by a sort of possession by the divine and the display of spiritual gifts.
Problemization
An ongoing process of defining and naming, often using statistics.
- Transforming difficulties and events to discernable problems.
- Way of categorizing
Race
“‘A culturally structured, systematic way of looking at, perceiving, and interpreting’ reality”
“A social construction to describe a group of people who share physical and cultural traits as well as a common ancestry”
Racism
Race is a social construction which declares a hierarchy of people in which physical characteristics are connected to assumed aptitudes and moral attributes.
Sickness
The public expression of illness/disease by a patient, including social expectations, role, obligations, and interactions.
Structural Competency
“The trained ability to discern how a host of issues defined clinically as symptoms, attitudes, or diseases (e.g., depression, hypertension, obesity, smoking, medication “non-compliance,” trauma, psychosis) also represent the downstream implications of a number of upstream decisions about such matters as health care and food delivery systems, zoning laws, urban and rural infrastructures, medicalization, or even about the very definitions of illness and health.” (Metzl and Hansen)
Structural Violence
When social structures (social, economic, or political systems) systematically harm groups of people by preventing them from meeting basic physical and/or emotional needs.
Technologies of the Self
Governance and control is not just something a powerful entity does to a subject, but also something a subject does in governing their own lives.
The idea that individuals should manage their health.
This also includes technologies can individual can use to conntrol and manage their health.
Therapeutic Outcome
“The disposition of participants at a designated endpoint of the therapeutic process.”
Disposition refers to both how satisfied someone is at the endpoint, and what changes have taken place.
Toxic Frustration
Individuals who experience toxic frustration feel reasonably certain that the environment is unhealthy, point to the huge manufacturing plants and agribusinesses around them as the primary causes of their environmental suffering, but also believe there is not much they can do about it given their socioeconomic status and the unresponsive- ness of the local or state government.”
Toxic Uncertainty
This cognitive and emotional state is characterized by:
1. Embrace of misinformed and scientifically unsound understanding about health and the environment
2. acceptance of “shifted responsibility” (i.e., blaming sufferers for their health problems)
3. Denial of risk (or acceptance of risk but denial of its seriousness)
4. A tendency to see anthropogenic dangers as natural
features of the environment.
Vernacular Healing
A framing of non-biomedical ideas, practices, and systems.
Is not creating a monolithic category, or an unchanging one.
Is not assuming there is a “pure” or “unadulterated” “traditional” medicine that exists wholly apart from biomedical contexts.
Waragi
A spirit (a form of gin) distilled from millet, cassava, bananas, or sugarcane.
Culture
Systems of beliefs, knowledge, norms, rules, mortalities, behaviors, materials, and institutions that are shared by groups of people
Symbols
A key aspect of culture is the presence of shared symbolic systems, where there is a consensus about things representing other things.
Cultural Competency
“Implies the trained ability to identify cross-cultural expressions of illness and health, and to thus counteract the marginalization of patients” by their social identities.
Argues that a patient’s overall experience of stigma will decrease, and their health outcomes will improve when working with a culturally-competent clinician.
Structural Competency
“The trained ability to discern how a host of issues defined clinically as symptoms, attitudes, or diseases (e.g., depression, hypertension, obesity, smoking, medication “non-compliance,” trauma, psychosis) also represent the downstream implications of a number of upstream decisions about such matters as health care and food delivery systems, zoning laws, urban and rural infrastructures, medicalization, or even about the very definitions of illness and health.” (Metzl and Hansen)
- (Shortened) The trained ability to symptoms, attitudes, and diseases are related to structural factors.
Biomedicine
- A system which seeks to apply principles of the natural sciences (biology, biochemistry ) to practices of diagnosing diseases and promoting health
- The people in this system include medical professionals that treat symptoms and do biomedical research.
- It makes the claim of universal applicability.
Medical Anthropology
Focuses on disease and illness (and their prevention), healing, medicine, health
care practices, and health care technologies as socially, or culturally,
constructed and maintained.
Quinine
Effectively treats Malaria
Allows Europeans to colonize Africa with less of a threat of malaria.
Objectification
Idea that there is a problem and technology can fix it
