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

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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