ANT-2 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Statistical Hypothesis Testing, Biomedicine, Social Inequality
Document Summary
Examines health systems as systems of meaning. Study how people in different cultures label, describe, and experience illness and how healing systems offer meaningful responses to individual and communal distress. Interpretivist anthropologists have examined aspects of healing, such as ritual trance, as symbolic performances. Main point is that the healing systems provide meaning to people who are experiencing seemingly meaningless forms of suffering. The provision of meaning offers psychological support to the afflicted and may enhance healing through the placebo effect. A positive result from a healing method due to a symbolic or otherwise nonmaterial factor. Most non-western cultures don"t dichotomize the mind/body or human/nature categories that westerners do. Many anthropologists agree that many non-western healing practices are of a religious healing nature. Provide emotionally safe environments for sufferers to suffer in. Focuses on balance in the body and ideas around hot/cold dichotomies. Focuses on analyzing how structural factors affect the prevailing health system, including types of afflictions, people".
