ANTHROP 1AA3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13: Medical Anthropology, Ethnomedicine, Bulimia Nervosa
14 Sep 2016
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Illness:
• Medical anthropology: cultural and physical anthropologists who study how different cultures think and behave
regarding illness, health and healing
o Also study how different cultures deal with death and illness at an emotional level
• Medical anthropologists: Study
▪ Culture specific illnesses
▪ Healers and healing cross culturally
▪ How illness is conceptualized differently in different socities
• Ethnomedicine: study of health systems cross-culturally
o Health systems include
▪ How people perceive health problems
▪ Disease prevention
▪ Diagnosis
▪ Healing disease
▪ Healers
o Western biomedicine emphasizes technology
• Culture-specific syndrome
o Health problems with symptoms associated with a particular culture
o Causes: stress, fear, shock
o Anorexia, bulimia
▪ Eating disorder in which individual refuses to maintain normal bidy weight
▪ Associated with western societies
▪ Found mostly in euro-american teen females
▪ Results from urbanization, modernization, stressors
▪ Socially constructed concepts of perfection, morality
• Ecological/epidemiological approach
o The environment interacts with culture to influence the cause and spread of health problems
• Critical medical anthropology approach
o Focus on how economic and political factors affect health and access to healing
o Issues
▪ Affliction is a product of someone's social position rather then natural
▪ Western doctor-patient relationship a form of social control
▪ Western medicine emphasizes technology and dehumanizing
▪ Creates health inequalities
▪ Poverty is a major cause of suffering death
• Healers
o Certain people having special abilities to diagnose and treat health problems
o Private: personalized and independent experience between doctor and patient (western societies)
o Community: an entire community are involved in the healing process
o Common characteristics of healers
▪ Selection
▪ Training
▪ Certification
▪ Recognition
▪ Payment
o Selection of healer based on symptoms/illness
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