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An Introduction to Medical Anthropology: Understanding the Interplay of Culture and Health, Study notes of Physical anthropology

An overview of anthropology, focusing on the subfield of medical anthropology. It discusses the importance of culture in shaping health and well-being, the role of anthropology in understanding health practices, and the historical context of medical anthropology. Key concepts include the holistic and comparative nature of anthropology, the definition and layers of culture, and the importance of context in understanding health and illness.

Typology: Study notes

Pre 2010

Uploaded on 12/01/2009

kornstalk51
kornstalk51 🇺🇸

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Lesson WEEK I
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Lesson WEEK I

What is anthropology?

Anthropology: the study of peoples and cultures

  • (^) Holistic: The whole is more than the sum of its

parts"

  • (^) Comparative: Evolutionary and cross-cultural
  • (^) Global

Anthropology: holistic study of peoples across times

and spaces.

Misuse of Culture

• Overemphasis of culture may lead to

misunderstanding, stereotypes, to prejudices

and discrimination

• Never the only influence, context is very

important…the historical, economic, social and

political and geographical…individual,

educational, socio-economic, and

environmental factors

• Context is everything

Field Methods in Anthropology

  • (^) Two main approaches to research:
    • (^) Ethnographic
    • (^) Comparative

Causes for the rise of medical anthropology

  • (^) desire to better understand health care practices in cultural terms
  • (^) desire to improve health care programs
  • (^) crisis in medicine
  • (^) change in global epidemiological pattern.
  • (^) epidemiology
  • (^) rise of new diseases
  • (^) designer medicine
  • (^) end of assumption of inevitable improving health
  • (^) cultural study of biomedicine emerges.

Medical anthropologists study such issues as:

  • Local interpretations of bodily processes
  • Perceptions of risk, vulnerability and responsibility for illness and health care
  • Risk and protective dimensions of human behavior, cultural norms and social institutions
  • Preventative health and harm reduction practices
  • The experience of illness and the social relations of sickness
  • Ethnomedicine, pluralistic healing modalities, and healing processes
  • The cultural and historical conditions shaping medical practices and policies
  • The use and interpretation of pharmaceuticals and forms of biotechnology
  • The commercialization and commodification of health and medicine
  • Differential use and availability of government and private health care resources
  • The political economy of health care provision.
  • The political ecology of infectious and vector borne diseases, chronic diseases and states of malnutrition, and violence
  • (^) Socio-Cultural
    • (^) Cultural constructivism
    • (^) Critical Medical Anthropology
  • (^) Bio-Cultural

Medical Anthropology Today

Four basic approaches:

  • (^) Interpretive Approach
  • (^) Ecological or evolutionary Approach
  • (^) Critical Medical anthropology
  • (^) Applied—more effective health interventions.

Perspective Used in your textbook

  • (^) BIO-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: Defined on page 7
  • (^) Example: Link found between biological changes and the social and cultural factors of a particular society in the incidence of a hereditary disease and rules of endogamy.
  • (^) Human life cycle is not just a universal biological fact but it is defined by culture.
  • (^) Medicalization: physical and mental changes associated with the body is seen as medical problem. For example, saddness, old age, adolescent

Placing Medical anthropology among social sciences of medicine

  • (^) Wider temporal and geographic scope
  • (^) Bio-cultural
  • (^) Combination of qualitative and quantitative research strategy