What is so What is so Anthropological about Anthropological about Health, Illness and Health, Illness and Healing?Healing?Medical Anthropology

What is Anthropology

Anthropos means human and logia is study so that anthropology is the study of humans

The study of human differences, cultural and biological, in the context of human nature. Anthropologists identify and compare behavior of a particular group against the full range of human behavior. These comparisons should uncover principles that apply to all human communities

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What is Anthropology

Anthropologists studied the way of life, remains, language, and physical characteristics of people -- social facts

Customs, values, and social patterns of different cultures were described and sometimes compared. How are different people in different places similar and different, both biologically and behaviorally? Spotting cultural patterns requires "fresh, neutral eyes."

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What is Culture?

How do you define it? How do you know when you’ve encountered it?

Culture . . . There is a strong interest in how culture

changes over time and in cross-cultural comparison that may lead to universal generalizations. Sometimes, this is called ethnology

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What is Culture?

Culture is that database of knowledge, values, and traditional ways of viewing the world that determines much of our behavior. Social structure (personal relationships and status in groups), especially kinship and marriage networks, but also family structures and property rights are integral parts of "culture.“

Culture is a system of shared values, ideas, concepts, meanings and rules that underlie and are expressed in the ways that human beings live.

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It’s about a group of people…

“It is the participants in a culture who give meaning to people, objects, and events. . . . It is by our use of things [and what we say, think, and feel about them] that we give them meaning.” (Stuart Hall 1997)

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Definitions of “Culture”- a note to keep in mind In 1952, anthropologists Alfred Kroeber

and Clyde Kluckhohn attempted to define culture.

160 definitions later, they stopped . . . . . . suggested that they were still not

finished.

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Definitions of “Culture”the bottom line Kroeber & Kluckhohn (1952) realized that all

of their definitions came down to three common areas

Meanings, social practices, and material products

What people think, what people do, and what people make

Culture’s most essential feature is that it is learned.

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Anthropological Definitions Historical: social heritage or tradition passed on to

succeeding generations Behavioral: shared, learned human behavior; a way of life Normative: ideals, values, rules for living Functional: methods of problem-solving and adapting to

specific environment Structural: patterns of interrelated ideas, symbols, and

behaviors Symbolic: arbitrarily assigned meanings agreed upon by a

society

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Finding & Decoding Cultural Components of Health, Illness, & Healing

Primary purpose is to uncover the historical, normative, and symbolic elements of culture

Historical: where does the culture of medicine come from? How did it develop and how is it passed on?

Normative: what ideals, values, and rules are inherent to the culture of medicine?

Symbolic: what are the agreed-upon meanings – of the body, of health/wellness, of disease/illness, of life/death?

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Why study culture in medical contexts? From an anthropological perspective,

culture is the single most significant evolutionary adaptation in the success of modern humans.

The particular way that a community of individuals organizes itself and marshals its skills, knowledge, and energies to combat disease is a central part of culture.

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Why study culture in medical contexts? Improving health care in Third World contexts (whether

home or abroad) requires culturally appropriate methods. What power relationship is implicit here?

All countries of the world are increasingly divided into healthy upper classes and continuing unhealthy underclasses (WHO 1999). What meanings & social practices contribute to this

power structure?

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What is so cultural about physiology and anatomy?Culture, Body and Technology

The SOCIAL Body

The human body has a social as well as a physical reality

The shape, size and adornments of the body are a way of communicating information about the individual

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The Body Self and Health

The social body or social self is socially constructed

The body image is a representation of him/herself

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The Body Self and Health

The health risk of such body image may damage the physiological and anatomical construction of a body

Such “mutilation” of the body is a self-identification and yet prone to health risk

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The Symbolic Body and Health

The concept of body self can is a representation of body aesthetics to the detriment of health and illness

Body self is culturally constructed

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The Function of the Body

Beliefs about the body structure can have clinical importance, those about how it functions are probably more significant in how they affect people’s behaviors

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The function of body and health

Medical Dualism Hot-Cold Evil-Good Omen Dirty-Clean Ugly-Beautiful Balance-Imbalance Yin-Yang Kulam-Barang

Medical Pluralism Western Medicine Traditional Medicine Ayurvedic Medicine Chinese Medicine Trans Medicine

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Cultural Language in Health(Symbolic Anatomies) Plumbing the body Heart of life Medical Technology

These some terms are mystical metaphors that bear no relation to physical reality, but it is because of these metaphors that individuals expresses themselves in terms of how they explain illness and health

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Medical Anthropology 21st Century

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