Week 9: Health, Medicine, and Society

Question 1

History of Medical Anthropology

Answer 1

• The study of interactions between culture, social structures, health, and illness
• Interested in how a person’s cultural background influences their experiences with health, illness, and medical systems.
• Understanding how intercultural encounters between Western biomedical approaches to health and health care and those of vulnerable minority, immigrant and indigenous populations affect experiences and understanding of health, disease, illness, suffering, and healing

Question 1

Methodologies and Perspectives

Answer 1

• Ethnographic
• Reflexive
• Biocultural
• Interpretive
• Critical Interpretive
• Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA)

Question 2

Studying Concepts of Illness and Healing

Answer 2

• Medical anthropology uses a holistic view to examine people’s ideas about illness, healing, health, and the body
• Illness and health are located in a web of biological, social, and cultural values

Question 3

Disease

Answer 3

A diagnosis of a clinically identifiable entity

Question 4

Illness

Answer 4

A set of social and cultural understandings about a set of symptoms; the experience a patient has of a disease

Question 5

Illness narratives

Answer 5

• Ways people relate the story of their illness from their own perspective. (Metaphor, Cultural models, Personification)

Question 6

Typology of Illness Narratives

Answer 6

• Natural causation
• Supernatural causation (mystical causes, animistic causes, magical causes)

Question 7

Biomedicine

Answer 7

X-rays, put in a cast for a long time, an infection

Question 8

Ethnomedicine

Answer 8

Type of poisonous plants (toxic to humans)

Question 9

Therapeutic processes

Answer 9

• Clinical
• Symbolic
• Social support
• Persuasive
• Doctor
• Therapist

Question 10

Body equilibrium theories

Answer 10

• Humoral theory
• Traditional Chinese Medicine
• Ayurvedic medicine

Question 11

A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology

Answer 11

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock Scheper-Hughes and Lock are two prominent medical anthropologists who have been influential in the sub-discipline

Question 12

Health Inequity

Answer 12

• Structural violence affects health outcomes (Comes from P studies)
• It also affects the placement of “blame” and therefore where we direct resources
• Critical medical anthropology studies the intersections of poverty, class, ethnicity, and health in terms of access and power
• Interested in inequality, politics, etc
• When you have high inequality you have a high rate of health issues
• Stereotypes to stigmatize people, individually or as a group

Question 13

Disability

Answer 13

• Dis-ability is an inherently negative term in English, and it leads to prejudice and discrimination
• Ethnographies of disability seek to understand the patient’s experience of physical or mental challenges and to understand the particular social and cultural context in which they live
• The way a patient’s community responds to physical and mental impairment is more important in shaping a person’s experience of disability than the impairment itself
• No reason some things can’t be in some places for those who are disabled

Question 14

Scheper-Hughes and Lock

Answer 14

• The biological fallacy and related assumptions that are paradigmatic to biomedicine
• Cartesian dualism
  “… begin from an assumption of the body as simultaneously a physical and symbolic artifact, as both naturally and culturally produced, and as securely anchored in a particular historical moment.”

Question 15

The Body Politic

Answer 15

• The regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies (individual and collective) in reproduction, sexuality, in work and in leisure, sickness and other forms of human difference
• Michel Foucault

Question 16

Theoretical Perspectives in Medical Anthropology

Answer 16

• Interpretive
• Biocultural
• Critical Medical Anthropology

Question 17

Interpretive Medical Anthropology

Answer 17

A version of Symbolic Anthropology, Interpretive Medical Anthropology looks at illness from an emic perspective attempting to understand health and disease relative to a particular group of people with a shared culture.

Question 18

Biocultural Approach in Medical Anthropology

Answer 18

• Strives to understand why people grow and develop as they do and why they may be at risk for health problems.
• As the name implies, the interest is in both the biological or physical aspects of health and illness and the interaction or interface between physical health outcomes and aspects of social and cultural interaction.

Question 19

Critical Medical Anthropology

Answer 19

• Is a branch of medical anthropology that blends critical theory and ground-level ethnographic approaches in the consideration of the political economy of health, and the effect of social inequality on people’s health
• Key names: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer Critical Theories include Feminisms, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Marxism etc.
• Political economy means attention is paid to history, social inequality, and relations of power within a group, society, nation, and/or globally

Question 20

Applied Medical Anthropology

Answer 20

• The practical application of anthropological techniques to areas such as industrial relations and minority-group problems.
  -Uses theories, methods, and ethnographic findings of anthropology to solve human problems related to health, illness, and well-being.