ANTH 227 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Medical Anthropology

• School: McGill University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 227
• Professor: Tobias Rees

Document Summary

5 steps to how anthropology of medicine came to be (3 are review, 1 is today"s lecture, 1 is next lecture) Young, historical development, doubt medicine, search for alternatives, possibility that rituals and ceremonies in other cultures can be medicine. Medical anthropology in 1970s by doctors for doctors, kleinman, born out of clinical encounters for clinical encounters. 1980"s, emergence of anthro of medicine, reaction of ethnographers of medicine against the arrival or med. anthro. To integrate aspects of anthro discourse on the body into current work in medical anthro. Believe kleinman has reduced anthro to a servant of his clinically oriented med. anthro. The experience of suffering is the definition of the human. The human condition does no vary across culture then. Significant before it teaches physicians that there are different ways in which people make sense. Thus different ways of articulating pain and suffering. To them, kleinman has not learned the lesson of anthropology.