Exam 2 Flashcards
Medical anthropologists try to use neutral language such as “experience,” “distress,” “social suffering,” “interiority,” and try to avoid “disease,” “pathology,” “disorder” – some anthropologists even avoid the term “illness” itself
Anthropology of Medical Distress
A form of language that is both universal and very culturally and contextually specific, encoding or reflecting social relationship, marking identity, or serving specific sociocultural functions
Taboo Language
Has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and medical law in terms of the general sanctity of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of patients to make choices (e.g. reproductive choices) that concern their own body
Bodily Autonomy
Classifications that, when known by people or by those around them, change the ways in which individuals experience themselves
Interactive Kinds
Patient’s description of mental distress, which directs attention to socially and culturally mediated ways of experiencing and expressing distress
Idioms of Distress
The study of health systems as system of meaning. It asks: How do humans across cultures make sense of health and illness? How do we think, talk and feel about illness, pain, suffering, birth, and mortality?
Interpretivist Approach in Medical Anthropology
Classifications that do not affect what they classify
Indifferent Kinds
The ways that the super-organism of human beings is consuming itself
Self-Devouring Growth
The notion that the body is an isolated, natural, and universal object
Biomedical Body
A branch of cultural anthropology that uses a variety of analytical perspectives to examine the wide range of experiences and practices that humans associate with disease, illness, health, well-being, and the body – both today and in the past
Medical Anthropology
Explores the impact of inequality on human health, considering (1) how economic and political systems, race, class, gender, and sexuality create and perpetuate unequal access to health care, and (2) how health systems are systems of power that promote health disparities by defining who is sick, who gets treated, and how treatment is provided
Critical Medical Anthropology
The social model of disability argues that people are disabled by the barriers that society puts up for them, while the medical model of disability argues that people are disabled by medical conditions
Models of Disability
Harm inflicted during or in relation to pregnancy, childbearing, and the post-partum period. Such violence can be both interpersonal and structural, arising from the actions of health-care providers and also from broader political and economic arrangements that disproportionately harm marginalized populations
Obstetric Violence
All the different kinds of work that language does, including the expressive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalinguistic functions
Multifunctionality
Activists argue that it is not a individual’s actual “impairments” which construct disability as a subordinate social status and devalued life experience, but socially imposed barriers
Disability Rights Movement
Structures (both linguistic and social) that simultaneously constrain and give rise to human actions, which in turn create, recreate, or reconfigure those same structures – and so on, with structures and actions successively giving rise to one another
Practice
A perspective on the relationship between language and thought that posits language requires/obligates speakers to pay attention to certain things about the world but ignore other things, which in turn, shapes the ways speakers think and act
Linguistic Relativity
Meaning and effect of language closely bound to context; meaning produced through contiguity or causality
Indexicality
There are higher proportions of people with mental illness in India – and possibly in non-Western countries more generally – than there are in the US and the West. Yet more people seem to recover spontaneously and more people who never quite recover hold down jobs and care for families more effectively
The “South Asian Puzzle” of Mental Health
Attitudes, opinions, beliefs of theories that we all have about language, which people are often unaware of
Language Ideologies
The process of acquiring language and the process of acquiring sociocultural knowledge are intimately tied
Language Socialization
The interaction of disease with the natural environment and human culture
Medical Ecology
The process of transforming inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people, or animals) into commodities, or objects for sale
Commodification
The extensive exchange of enslaved people, sugar, cotton, and furs between Europe, Africa, and the Americas that transformed economic, political, and social life in both sides of the Atlantic
Triangle Trade
The study of language as social action and a cultural resource people use where language is understood as doing something in the world, instead of just reflecting a pre-existing world (i.e. presupposes and entails context)
Language and Culture
Self-perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes develop in response to external influences over a lifetime that shape one’s conception of the world and where one fits into it
Habitus
A given classification that possesses intrinsic unity: it is neither a random phenomenon nor an artifact of the techniques through which it is detected, treated, experienced, or studied; “intrinsic unity” is what anchors any classification’s “portability” across contexts
Validity
Any human aggregate characterized by regular or frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregate by significant differences in language use
Speech Community
An umbrella term that encompasses a variety of approaches to childbirth, tied together by an overall emphasis on centering women’s autonomy in their birth choices, valorizing the natural and physiological over the technological, and promoting respectful birth care
Humanization
