ANTH 227 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Aspirin, Sick Role, Asymmetric Relation
Document Summary
For thousands of years, we only had self-medication and traditional medicine. Body = machine / tabula rasa / black box. Natural order vs. social order (nature / culture dichotomy) Marx, engels, benjamin, merleau-ponty all tried to break with the body-mind dualism. Recently latour, haraway, foucault and others show how the biological body is not universal and; discourse and practices of bm are permeated by political, social and cultural forces. Both bm and tm are (cid:312)an assemblage of knowledge and practices inextricably associated with political expediencies, social interests, and embedded values(cid:313) (59) As far as we know (cid:312)people everywhere have always amassed knowledge and instituted practices designed to preserve health and account for the incidence, etiology, and treatment of illness(cid:313) (60) Causes of disease are outside the body (human social relations, environment, spiritual order, even misfortune) Other medical systems like tcm, ayurvedic, galenic, etc focus on corporeal and extracorporeal events including social and environmental processes.
