ANTH 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Syndemic, Medical Anthropology, Participant Observation
Document Summary
Examine how medical anthropology: is an applied approach relying on participant observation as a research method, shows that a cultural perspective uncovers matters of illness and health often ignored by traditional medicine. Discuss how different cultures understand the causes of sickness and health. Learn how sickness and health are shaped by the global economy. It focuses on human health and ways that human populations perceive and react to disease and illness. Health is a sense of physical, emotional, and mental well-being shaped by cultural, social and political experiences and expectations. Suffering explains that physical, mental, or emotional distress associated with a disease extends beyond a traditional western biomedical focus only on biological functioning. Sickness sometimes closely corresponds to western concepts of disease that are based in physical causes: but medical anthropologists see sickness as how members of a particular cultural community recognize and classify physical, mental and emotional distress. Culture-bound syndromes are unique to a particular cultural group.
