Introducing Medical Anthropology

This revised textbook provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical anthropology. The narrative is guided by unifying themes. First, medical anthropology is actively engaged in helping to address pressing health problems around the globe through research, intervention, and policy-related initiatives. Second, illness and disease cannot be fully understood or effectively addressed by treating them solely as biological in nature; rather, health problems involve complex biosocial processes and resolving them requires attention to range of factors including systems of belief, structures of social relationship, and environmental conditions. Third, through an examination of health inequalities on the one hand and environmental degradation and environment-related illness on the other, the book underlines the need for going beyond cultural or even ecological models of health toward a comprehensive medical anthropology. The authors show that a medical anthropology that integrates biological, cultural, and social factors to truly understand the origin of ill health will contribute to more effective and equitable health care systems.

Introducing Medical Anthropology, Third Edition, is intended for use in the medical anthropology course taught primarily at four year universities.

The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction and overview to the critical perspective as it has evolved in medical anthropology over the last ten years. Standing as an opposition approach to conventional medical anthropology, critical medical anthropology has emphasized the importance of political and economy forces, including the exercise of power, in shaping health, disease, illness experience, and health care.

Now in its fourth edition, Exploring Medical Anthropology provides a concise and engaging introduction to medical anthropology. It presents competing theoretical perspectives in a balanced fashion, highlighting points of conflict and convergence. Concrete examples and the author’s personal research experiences are utilized to explain some of the discipline’s most important insights, such as that biology and culture matter equally in the human experience of disease and that medical anthropology can help to alleviate human suffering. The text has been thoroughly updated for the fourth edition, including fresh case studies and a new chapter on drugs. It contains a range of pedagogical features to support teaching and learning, including images, text boxes, a glossary, and suggested further reading.

This work offers productive insight into the field of medical anthropology and its future, as viewed by some of the world's leading medical anthropologists.

Critical Medical Anthropology presents inspiring work from scholars doing and engaging with ethnographic research in or from Latin America, addressing themes that are central to contemporary Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA). This includes issues of inequality, embodiment of history, indigeneity, non-communicable diseases, gendered violence, migration, substance abuse, reproductive politics and judicialisation, as these relate to health. The collection of ethnographically informed research, including original theoretical contributions, reconsiders the broader relevance of CMA perspectives for addressing current global healthcare challenges from and of Latin America. It includes work spanning four countries in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru) as well as the trans-migratory contexts they connect and are defined by. By drawing on diverse social practices, it addresses challenges of central relevance to medical anthropology and global health, including reproduction and maternal health, sex work, rare and chronic diseases, the pharmaceutical industry and questions of agency, political economy, identity, ethnicity, and human rights.

A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities brings together articles from the key theoretical approaches in the field of medical anthropology as well as related science and technology studies. The editors’ comprehensive introductions evaluate the historical lineages of these approaches and their value in addressing critical problems associated with contemporary forms of illness experience and health care. Presents a key selection of both classic and new agenda-setting articles in medical anthropology Provides analytic and historical contextual introductions by leading figures in medical anthropology, medical sociology, and science and technology studies Critically reviews the contribution of medical anthropology to a new global health movement that is reshaping international health agendas

A Companion to Medical Anthropology examines the current issues, controversies, and state of the field in medical anthropology today. Provides an expert view of the major topics and themes to concern the discipline since its founding in the 1960s Written by leading international scholars in medical anthropology Covers environmental health, global health, biotechnology, syndemics, nutrition, substance abuse, infectious disease, and sexuality and reproductive health, and other topics