The third edition of Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action, provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical and health anthropology. The narrative is guided by unifying themes. First, health-oriented anthropologists are very involved in the process of helping, to varying degrees, to change the world around them through their work in applied projects, policy initiatives, and advocacy. Second, the authors present the fundamental importance of culture and social relationships in health and illness by demonstrating that illness and disease involve complex biosocial processes and that resolving them requires attention to a range of factors beyond biology. Third, through an examination of the issue of health inequality, this book underlines the need for an analysis that moves beyond cultural or even ecological models of health toward a comprehensive biosocial approach. Such an approach integrates biological, cultural, and social factors in building unified theoretical understandings of the origin of ill health, while contributing to the building of effective and equitable national health-care systems.

NEW TO THIS EDITION

• All chapters have been updated or expanded.
• NEW: Chapter 8, “The Biopolitics of Life: Biotechnology, Biocapital, and Bioethics.”•Revised text style for crisper language and livelier phrasing.
• Added a brief signposting of chapter content at the beginning of each chapter and reviewquestions about the key issues and concepts at the end of each chapter.
• Expanded discussion of Zika, Ebola, gender and health, PTSD and psychological anthropol-ogy, geriatric health, the contemporary vaccine controversy, the internet and health, and thehealth impacts of fracking and nuclear energy development.
• Concluding chapter examines anthropologically informed strategies and visions for a health-ier world.

Preface

About the Authors

1 INTRODUCTION TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HEALTH

Introduction and Overview

Encountering Health Anthropology

Three Case Studies in Applied Health Anthropology

Coping with Cystic Fibrosis

The Bone Crusher

Pesticide Poisoning

Practical and Theoretical Contributions of Health Anthropology

Clarifying the Culture of Health and Illness

Health Inequality

Defining Health Anthropology

Culture and Biology

History of Health Anthropology

The Straits Expedition

W. H. R. Rivers and Beyond

Rudolf Virchow

Erwin Ackerknecht and William Caudill

The Postwar Period

Health Anthropology and National Development

The Discipline Is Born

The Relationship of Health Anthropology to Anthropology and to Other Health-Related Disciplines

Health Research and the Subfields of Anthropology

Health Anthropology and Epidemiology

Illness and Help-Seeking Behavior

Health Anthropology and Public Health

Health Anthropology and Bioethics

Health Anthropology Theories

Medical Ecology

Meaning-Centered Health Anthropology

Critical Health Anthropology

2 WHAT HEALTH ANTHROPOLOGISTS DO

Introduction and Overview

Three Settings, Three Case Studies, Three Health Anthropologists

Life and Death in Tanala

Studying Surgeons

Folk Illness in Haiti

A Case Study

Having Impact

What Health Anthropologists Study

A Diverse Discipline

Studying the Life Course

Conducting Research: A Peculiarly Anthropological Approach

Holistic, Field-Based Understanding

Ethnography

Complex Sociocultural Tapestries

Research Methods

Multimethod Research

Examining Lives

Focus Group Interviews

Considering Consensus

Doing Diaries

Quantitative Methods

Broader Collaboration

Health Anthropology in Use

Mobilizing Research Findings

The Health Anthropology Crystal Ball

3 UNDERSTANDING HEALTH, ILLNESS, AND DISEASE

Introduction and Overview

Conceptions of Health and Illness

Defining Terms

Differentiating Disease and Illness

Reconceptualizing Disease and Illness

Understanding Cure

Folk Understandings

Understandings of Disease Causation

Humanizing Biomedicine

Sufferer Experience

Experience and Cultural Symbols

Cultural Emotions

Social Suffering

Beyond Social Suffering

Disability and Chronic Illness

The Patient in the Body

The Cultural Construction of Disability

Stigmatization

Human Rights and Health

Illness Narratives

The Social Uses of Narration

Analyzing Narrative

Embodied Health Experience

Why Bodies?

Body Theory

Bodies in the Age of Immunology

Cyborg Bodies

Mindful Bodies

Engendered Bodies

Understanding Medicalization

Healer versus Sufferer Conception of Disease

The Two Sides of Compliance

Insider and Outsider Assessments of Health Status

One Word, Two Meanings

Diseased but Not Ill

Mismessaging

Analyzing Health Discourse

4 HEALTH DISPARITY, HEALTH INEQUALITY

Introduction and Overview

What Is Health Disparity?

Health Disparity in the United States

Gasping for Breath

Causes of Health Disparity: Lifestyle versus Social Inequality

Living Right

Structural Explanation

Biology of Poverty

Insuring Disease

Culturally Competent Care

Health and Social Disparities Cross-Culturally

Child and Maternal Health Disparities

Addressing Health Disparities

Addressing Health Disparities in the Community

Upstream Analyses of Health Disparities

Gender and Global Health

Focusing on Disparity in Diseases

Multidisciplinary Approaches

Studying Local Mediation of Global Health

Pushing Back on Health Disparities

“Race” and Health Disparity

Race and Racism

5 HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT: TOWARD A HEALTHIER WORLD

Introduction and Overview

Medical Ecology and Critical Health Anthropology on the Environment

Health and the Environment in the Past

Health and the Environment Today

Depletion of Natural Resources and Environmental Degradation

Capitalism and Climate Change

Infectious Diseases in a Globalizing World

The Impact of Climate Change on Health

Other Environmental Impacts on Health

Water and Globalization

The Political Ecology of Cancer

Cancer in the Community

Cancer and Industry

China’s Cancer Villages

Anthropological Examinations of Cancer Treatment

Nuclear Reactors and Health

Unconventional Natural Gas Extraction and Health

The Impact of Private Motor Vehicles on Health

The Political Ecology of AIDS: Assessing a Contemporary Syndemic

6 ETHNOMEDICINE: THE WORLDS OF TREATMENT AND HEALING

Introduction and Overview

Approaching Ethnomedicine

Indigenous and Folk Medicine Systems

Ways of Healing

Typologies of Healing Systems

An Evolutionary Model of Disease Theories and Healing Systems

Health, Illness, and Medicine in Family-Level Foraging Societies

Health, Illness, and Medicine in Village-Level Societies

Health, Illness, and Medicine in Pastoralist Societies

Health, Illness, and Medicine in Chiefdom Societies

Folk Healers in Modern Societies

Case Study: Are the Therapeutic Aspects of Religion Something That Partially Address Refugee Health Problems?

Biomedicine as the Predominant Ethnomedicine in Modern Societies

Hospitals

Health Anthropology and the Pharmaceutical Industry

7 PLURAL MEDICAL SYSTEMS: COMPLEXITY, COMPLEMENTARITY, AND CONFLICT

Introduction and Overview

A Case Study of Medical Pluralism in a Rural Area in a Developing Society: The Altiplano of Bolivia183

Themes

Medical Subsystems

Status of Health Care in Bolivia in the Pre-Revolutionary Era

Social and Health Conditions in Bolivia after the Election of Indigenous President Evo Morales

A Case Study of Medical Pluralism in an Urban Setting of a Developing Society: A View from Central Java

Medical Subsystems

A Case Study of Medical Pluralism in a Developed Society: The Australian Dominative Medical System

Medical Subsystems

Typologies of Plural Medical Systems

Healing and History

Patients of CAM

CAM and Class

New Directions in the Study of Medical Pluralism

Medical Syncretism

Medical Diversity

Medicoscapes

The Globalization of Traditional Medicine and CAM

8 THE BIOPOLITICS OF LIFE: BIOTECHNOLOGY, BIOCAPITAL, AND BIOETHICS

Introduction and Overview

Critical Health Anthropology and Biotechnology

Science, Nature, and Culture

Biocapital: Bodies of Profit

Reproductive Technologies

Divisible Bodies

Bringing the Lab into the Field: Anthropology and the Neurosciences

Molecular Biotechnologies: Tiny Pieces, Giant Infrastructures

The Story of hGH—Growing up Growth Hormone

The Culture of PCR

Visualization Technologies

When Technologies Combine

Ancestry, Families, and Genetics: Biotechnology and Belonging

9 STRATEGIES AND VISIONS FOR A HEALTHIER WORLD

Introduction and Overview

Global Capitalism

Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Pathway for a Healthier World

Health Anthropology as an Action-Oriented Endeavor

Source Material for Students

Glossary

References

Index