ANTHROP 3HI3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Medical Anthropology, Medicalization, Biopolitics
27 Mar 2019
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Document Summary
How illness is understood and experienced, theorized about, and treated. How groups of people deal with life events like birth, illness, and death. How people conceptualized healing and those that heal. Illness and healing are at the nexus of medicine and religion, and must be understood in their cultural contexts. Anthropology followed european explorers as people began to write about their experiences of difference with the people they encountered. Studies of the healing rituals of small-scale societies and indigenous healing specialists across africa, the pacific, and the americas are sources that medical anthropology drew from. These sources described medicine"s role in providing explanations for mysterious events, and healing as a social process. Attempts to explain or generalize about how diseases are caused or treated showed the relationship btwn medicine and religion: Myth and worldview help to shape conceptions of the body and its place in nature. Healers as specialists whose role might overlap with shaman or priest.
