ANTC61H3 Chapter Notes -Medical Anthropology, Human Science, Social Anthropology
Document Summary
Anthropologists are working in societies with increasing access to high technology medical regimes, though often in partial and incomplete ways, and the medical imaginary" a profound fascination with biotechnologies and therapeutics. Diseases and biotechnologies follow new structures of inequalities, no longer neatly ties to. Developed" vs. developing" or high and low income nations, producing unthinkable existential dilemmas and new contradictions. Indebted indian women have to decide whether to sell their kidneys to maintain family. Individuals are forced to decide whether to mortgage their futures to pay for cancer treatments. Medical anthropology emerged as a distinctive sub-discipline within social anthropology iin the. It was shaped as the comparative study of medical systems". Medicine deals with two types of reality: scientific reality, ordinary reality. Or in other words, medicine is both a: biophysical science: modern medical theory concerns itself with this, human science: Wittgenstein refers to language as a mediating reality. Medicine is always found to constitute a system.
