ANTH 227 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Biomedicine, Charismatic Authority, Teleology
25 Jan 2018
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Document Summary
What biomedicine does do, and extraordinarily well, is to offer scientific understanding and technological control of sickness. That is an enormous achievement that no one can or should gainsay. No other system of healing, moreover, provides a fraction of the efficacy and efficiency that biomedicine offers. Bureaucracy impersonal and rational and based on rules rather than ties of kinship, friendship, or patrimonial or charismatic authority: division of labor, permanence: exists with or without the people in it. Spawns a way of thinking and a way of being. Max weber: life is focused not on persons, but on impersonal rational goals. : not focused on people. Death bureaucratic failure: medical bureaucracy meant to keep people alive as long as possible. Modern medicine cannot answer what is considered a good life. Process of making meaning in the face of disaster, which. Call into question the notion that being dependent on someone is abnormal.
