Exam 2

Question 1

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

Answer 1

Anthropology of Medical Distress

Question 2

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

Answer 2

Taboo Language

Question 3

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

Answer 3

Bodily Autonomy

Question 4

Classifications that, when known by people or by those around them, change the ways in which individuals experience themselves

Answer 4

Interactive Kinds

Question 5

Patient’s description of mental distress, which directs attention to socially and culturally mediated ways of experiencing and expressing distress

Answer 5

Idioms of Distress

Question 6

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?

Answer 6

Interpretivist Approach in Medical Anthropology

Question 7

Classifications that do not affect what they classify

Answer 7

Indifferent Kinds

Question 8

The ways that the super-organism of human beings is consuming itself

Answer 8

Self-Devouring Growth

Question 9

The notion that the body is an isolated, natural, and universal object

Answer 9

Biomedical Body

Question 10

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

Answer 10

Medical Anthropology

Question 11

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

Answer 11

Critical Medical Anthropology

Question 12

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

Answer 12

Models of Disability

Question 13

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

Answer 13

Obstetric Violence

Question 14

All the different kinds of work that language does, including the expressive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalinguistic functions

Answer 14

Multifunctionality

Question 15

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

Answer 15

Disability Rights Movement

Question 16

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

Answer 16

Practice

Question 17

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

Answer 17

Linguistic Relativity

Question 18

Meaning and effect of language closely bound to context; meaning produced through contiguity or causality

Answer 18

Indexicality

Question 19

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

Answer 19

The “South Asian Puzzle” of Mental Health

Question 20

Attitudes, opinions, beliefs of theories that we all have about language, which people are often unaware of

Answer 20

Language Ideologies

Question 21

The process of acquiring language and the process of acquiring sociocultural knowledge are intimately tied

Answer 21

Language Socialization

Question 22

The interaction of disease with the natural environment and human culture

Answer 22

Medical Ecology

Question 23

The process of transforming inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people, or animals) into commodities, or objects for sale

Answer 23

Commodification

Question 24

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

Answer 24

Triangle Trade

Question 25

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)

Answer 25

Language and Culture

Question 26

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

Answer 26

Habitus

Question 27

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

Answer 27

Validity

Question 28

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

Answer 28

Speech Community

Question 29

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

Answer 29

Humanization