Comparing Cultural Knowledge Across Different Settings
In addition to the general comparisons across cultural settings discussed above, a number of studies have taken a closer look at what can be learned through a comparative approach. Three different approaches are examined here. The most ambitious of these is a collaborative, multisite study using a shared methodology to study intra- and inter-cultural variation in beliefs Weller, Pachter, Trotter, amp Baer, 1993, p. 109 for four geographically separated and distinctive Latin American samples....
Active Demand Passive ACCEPTANCE
Apart from structural barriers, health belief studies also aim at identifying and finding solutions to cultural barriers to vaccination acceptance. Acceptance of vaccinations can, according to Nichter 1995 , be differentiated into active demand and passive acceptance. Active demand entails adherence to vaccination programs by an informed public which perceives the benefits of and need for specific vaccinations. Passive acceptance denotes compliance passive acceptance of vaccinations by a public...
Biocultural Models of Human Growth
Human growth is part of the biocultural nature of our species. Since the late 19th century, anthropologists such as Boas have used biocultural models of human development. By the mid-20th century, the discovery of the nature of DNA and other fundamentals of developmental biology led to a biocultural model that considered human development as, basically, a biological process which could be influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the social and cultural environment. By the late 20th century,...
Introduction Qtv
The post-World War II era marked the rise of new nation-states. Released from the shackles of European colonialism, the former colonies as newly emerging nations began to chart their own courses toward becoming modern global partners with and for their former colonizers. Manifestos of various political persuasions and economic strategies became blueprints for transforming colonialist architectures of rule into nationalist administrations. One important manifesto that spoke a common language...
Measuring Variability in a Cultural Setting and Cultural Consensus Theory
Variability in cultural knowledge about illness within an identified setting was first systematically addressed by Fabrega in the Mayan community of Zinacantan, Mexico Fabrega, 1970 Fabrega amp Silver, chapter 7, 1973 . A form of term-frame interview was used where a set of 18 illness terms were paired with 24 possible bodily disturbances symptoms . Two groups one composed of 30 practicing h'iloletik shamans and the other 30 laymen were compared. A chi-square analysis found no significant...
CrossCultural Review of Responses to Bodily and Behavioral Differences
As a broad inclusive category, and from a strict constructionist perspective, disability exists only in locally specific relation to Western European notions of medicalization, employment, and welfare Groce, 1999 Whyte amp Ingstad, 1995 . Yet, some range of physical and behavioral differences are recognized in all societies and there are often social consequences that follow from this recognition. While it is of paramount importance to elucidate local contexts, knowledge, and responses in the...
CholeraA WaterBorne Disease
The practically invisible bacterium Vibrio cholerae made millions of people sick and die before it was first recognized in 1503 Kiple, 1993 . Easily transmitted through water and food, sudden large outbreaks of cholera can occur through fecal contamination of a water supply. Cholera outbreaks are often associated with a breakdown in sanitary conditions such as those following a hurricane or flood where drinking water systems are contaminated with fecal matter as pipes break and raw sewage...
Medicalization of Wellness
Medicalization is not limited to sickness and deviance. Wellness the avoidance of disease and illness, and the improvement of health is today a widespread virtue, notably among the middle classes. As part of modernity, practices designed to support individual health have been actively promoted for over a century, and are now widely followed. The individual body, separated from mind and society, is managed according to criteria elaborated in the biomedical sciences, and this activity becomes one...
Contributors
Thomas S. Abler, Department of Anthropology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Steven Acheson, Archaeology Branch, Government of British Columbia, Victoria, British Columbia Naomi Adelson, Department of Anthropology, York University, Toronto, Ontario Pascale A. Allotey, Department of Public Health, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Hans A....
Anthropological Interviewing and Psychoanalytic Process Comparison
Anthropologists from early on have been aware of the importance of the relationship between the ethnographer and his or her principal informants, and the relationships he or she forms in the culture studied. Malinowski wrote a great deal about his close relationship with the chief of Kiriwina and the garden magician Bagido'u Joseph B. Casagrande 1950 even published a collection of articles written by anthropologists about their principal informants, or those with whom they had closest...
Psychoanalytic Understanding of Ritual Cure and Prophylaxis
Psychoanalysis, Freud tells us, is a mode of treatment of mental illness, a method on which that treatment is based, and a theory built on the results of that method. Let us begin with the mode of treatment. If psychoanalysis can provide a treatment that cures neurosis in our own culture, then it must also be possible, using psychoanalytic theory, to understand the successes of native therapies in other cultures. To the extent that shamanic cures Freeman, 1967 Toffelmeier amp Luomala, 1936 ,...
References Pld
Browner, C., amp Sargent, C. 1996 . Anthropological studies of human reproduction. In C. Sargent amp T. Johnson Eds. , Medical anthropology Contemporary theory and method Rev. ed., pp. 219-235 . Westport, CT Praeger. Cosminsky, S. 1976 . Cross-cultural perspectives on midwifery. In F. X. Grollig, S. J. Harold, amp B. Haley Eds. , Medical anthropology pp. 229-249 . The Hague Mouton. Davis-Floyd, R. E. 1992 . Birth as an American rite of passage. Berkeley University of California Press....
Risks for Children
The pattern of child growth, including dependency on older individuals for food and protection, small body size, slow rate of growth, and delayed reproductive maturation, entails liabilities. Mild-to-moderate energy under-nutrition is, perhaps, the most common risk, with estimates that 28 of all children, equaling 150 million, are undernourished in developing nations UNICEF, 2001 . Undernutrition may be due to food shortages alone, but equally likely it is due to work loads and infectious...
Historical Development of Bioethics as a Cultural Domain of Inquiry
Bioethics emerged in the 1960s in response to myriad factors including biotechnological developments, namely hemodialysis, organ transplantation, and mechanical ventilation the civil rights movement the backlash against physician paternalism and revelations about abuses in human subjects research Beecher, 1966 Fox, 1990 Rothman, 1990 . Technological developments, for instance, raised questions about allocation of scarce resources and whether quality or quantity of life should figure in...
Vaccination Programs their Culture and Context
Global policy-making processes have been studied more by medical historians and health policy scientists than by medical anthropologists. Medical anthropologists have focused on the implementation of immunization programs and the acceptability of vaccines in diverse socio-cultural settings. They have shown how at the local level immunization programs are characterized by a target-oriented approach and emphasis on strict adherence to vaccination rules and procedures that have been developed in...
Biomedical Anthropology and the Evolution of DiabetesThrifty Genotypes and
Anthropologists have been interested in evolutionary models of type 2 diabetes that explain the vastly different prevalence rates among worldwide populations. Of interest is the current epidemic in populations with multiple generations of high diabetes rates i.e., Pima Indians , in newly designated populations with rapidly increasing incidence rates i.e., urban South African populations , and in children and adolescents in populations that have had a history of high prevalence rates among...
References 1
Baer, H. A., Singer, M., amp Johnson, J. H. 1986 . Toward a critical medical anthropology. Social Science and Medicine, 23 2 , 95-98. Brodwin, P. Ed. . 2000 . Biotechnology and culture Bodies, anxieties, ethics. Bloomington Indiana University Press. Browner, C. H., Ortiz de Montellano, B. R., amp Rubel, A. J. 1988 . A methodology for cross-cultural ethnomedical research. Current Anthropology, 29 5 , 681-689. Chrisman, N. J. 1978 . The health-seeking process An approach to the natural history of...
Drugs after
The florescence of wide varieties of recreational drug use in the United States and Western Europe occurred in an historical setting in the 1960s in which for decades, drug use had been the object of negative public opinion Morgan, 1981 Musto, 1987 . The emergence of these patterns, despite the widespread negative perceptions of drugs, excited curiosity about the true impact of consuming drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. Cannabis Initiative. Attempts to determine the impact of marijuana...
Methods and the Conceptual Organization of the Illness Domain
Under Goodenough's broad mandate, considerable attention became directed to developing a kind of ethnography in which the methods of description are public and replicable Tyler, 1969, p. 20 as integral to the process of discovering how cultural knowledge is organized in the mind D'Andrade, 1995, p. 248 . In this section, three such methodologically oriented approaches used in studying the conceptual organization of the illness domain are described. An early article by Frake entitled The...
Our Nutritious Past and Todays Health
The major diseases and health problems affecting people in the modern world, such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and some forms of cancer, are related to diet. This implies that present-day Western dietary habits, characterized by high intakes of fat and low intakes of fiber, may have a role in causing modern health problems. It has been suggested that humans may not be well adapted to eating dairy products and grains because we have lived as hunter-gatherers for...
Water Insecurity and its Relationship to WaterRelated Diseases
While medical anthropology has contributed to a significant and recognized portion of the literature on behaviors and beliefs associated with water-borne diseases, anthropologists have also begun to study the relationship between water scarcity and water insecurity and the intransigence of certain water-borne diseases such as endemic cholera. Following the 1991 cholera epidemic that swept across northern South America, massive public health aid controlled the epidemic in most of the urban...
Latah
Latah, from the Malay word for ticklish, denotes a person who responds to being startled by temporarily entering an altered state in which she or he will obey commands, imitate movements or sounds repeatedly, utter rude or obscene language, and or act in sexually inappropriate ways Winzeler, 1995 . Like amok, latah has been described in English language literature for some time, with earliest mentions dating from the 19th century. From the late 1960s to the present, anthropologists have debated...
Introduction Pox
Patterns of diet and activity, and nutritional and health status vary across cultures and historical periods. For example, currently there are populations living as hunter-gatherers and also groups subsisting on diets high in fat and refined carbohydrates. The nutrition and health situations in developing countries have been exemplified by nutrient deficiencies, such as protein-energy malnutrition, iron deficiency anemia, vitamin A deficiency, and iodine deficiency, in addition to periodic...
Dietary Transitions Lifestyle Factors and Diabetes
Anthropologists have explored cultural models of illness and the experience of being a person with diabetes. Cultural etiological models often include dietary elements, especially sugar and processed foods, that represent a departure from traditional, ethnically important diets Kuhnlein amp Receveur, 1996 . Although many studies discuss the historical trends in type 2 diabetes as a result of modernization, Westernization, or even cokacolization and McDonaldization as creating obeseogenic and...
The Medicalization Critique
In writing a review article about medicalization Conrad 1992 argues that during the 1970s and 1980s the term was used most often as a critique of inappropriate med-icalization, rather than simply to convey the idea that something had been made medical. The sociological and anthropological literature of this period argued uniformly that health professionals had become agents of social control. This position was influenced by the publications of Szasz 1961 and Laing 1960 in connection with...
Cytogenetic Conditions
During the 20th century it became apparent to geneticists that chromosomes the structures that package the genes could be mutated independently of the genes themselves. Any cytogenetic condition, that is, a genetic disease caused solely by the rearrangement of whole or parts of chromosomes, came to be called a major chromosome anomaly MCA . Among the better-known examples of MCAs are Down syndrome trisomy 21 , Turner syndrome monosomy X , Klinefelter syndrome XXY aneuploidy , and Cri-du-chat...
The Evolution of Healing Behaviors
Current interpretations of the origins of health-maintaining behaviors and of medical systems posit the evolution of healmemes in higher primates and in humans Fabrega, 1997, p. 184 the term meme comes from Dawkins, 1982 . A healmeme is a unit of information or instruction learned by an individual in dealing with pain, injury, or illness. This unit is stored in the brain and later communicated and transmitted to others. It is not a genetic trait, but if it has beneficial effects at the...
Biology and Nature Constructing Biomedicines Ultimate Realities
The study of the clinical practices of Biomedicine has led to major observations about the realities with which it is concerned. Such research has demonstrated that professional medical systems represent a variety of biological realities, not one. Traditional Chinese medicine is very distinct from Biomedicine Kleinman, 1980 Unschuld, 1985 its biological focus is complemented by a strong focus on energy. The same is true of Unnani, the professional medicine of the Middle East derived from Greek...
Translating Biomedicine
Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, Biomedicine was massively exported into Third World countries. Sometimes it was borrowed and at others it was exported as a result of its colonialist imposition Kleinman, 1980 Lock, 1993 Reynolds, 1976 Weisberg amp Long, 1984 . Still later, it was actively sought by developing countries as a feature of modernization. The modernizing process acts as an homogenizing funnel that channels development toward univariate points in economics, capitalism in...
Dental Paleopathology
Caries cavities is very much a disease of civilization but has probably always been associated with humans and is found in wild apes as well. Caries have been noted in Australopithecines, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals. Neolithic populations show caries in 2-10 of all teeth. For the Roman period and the middle ages the figure is slightly higher, 5-14 , but with the increase in the use of more refined sugars and flours in the diet over the past 1,000 years the incidence has risen to the modern...
Introduction Nfq
Research on reproductive health within medical anthropology encompasses people's emic perspectives on all matters related to sexuality and reproductive processes and functions. Some of the earliest works to describe ethnophysiological understandings include Ashley Montagu's 1949 work on understandings of conception, fetal development, and embryology among Australian indigenous peoples. Likewise, Malinowski's 1932 work in the Solomon Islands and Margaret Mead's 1928 work in Samoa may be seen as...
References Ekz
Abu-Sahlieh, S. A. A. 1994 . To mutilate in the name of Allah and Jehova Legitimization of male and female circumcision. Medicine and Law, 13,575-622. Abusharaf, R. M. 1995 . Rethinking feminist discourses on female genital mutilation The case of Sudan. Canadian Woman Studies, 15 2-3 ,52-54. Abusharaf, R. M. 1996 . Revisiting feminist discourses on female circumcision Responses from Sudanese indigenous feminists. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association 95th Annual...
Theories and Methods Basics of Demography
Demography studies the size, composition, distribution, and dynamics of populations. Size refers to the number of persons, usually counted in a census, which can be more or less accurate depending on the method and thoroughness of counting. Composition deals with a breakdown of total population in terms of sex and age categories, and can also include other categories such as race ethnic group and SES. Distribution primarily maps the placement and density of populations. Finally, and most...
The Modern Era
The Foundation of Genetics. The traditional foundation of genetics, and therefore of medical genetics, dates from the 1900 rediscovery of Mendel's papers Dunn, 1965 . Between the years 1902 and 1909, several additional, clarifying terms were defined by the founder of genetics William Bateson 1861-1926 and his colleagues these included cornerstone concepts such as genetics, segregation, P1, F1 and F2, allelomorph allele , homozygosity and heterozygosity, epistasis, and indeed Mendelism itself....
References Wld
Anonymous. 1997a . Molecular medicine A primer for clinicians. Part X Clinical implications of the new genetics I. South Dakota Journal of Medicine, 50 11 , 401-404. Anonymous. 1997b . Molecular medicine A primer for clinicians Part XI Clinical implications of the new genetics II. South Dakota Journal ofMedicine, 50 12 , 445-448. Atran, S. 1998 . Folk biology and the anthropology of science Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavior and Brain Sciences, 21 4 , 547-569 discussion...
Oversimplification and Other Dangers
Some controversy surrounds the fact that all the categorization schemes discussed above entail central contrasts. Many would argue that it is a mistake to cast medical systems as simply one or the other of a given contrasting pair. Rather, the contrasts may be thought of as occupying a continuum, with each system containing some of each emphasis. When determining a classification, the researcher must ask not which ideal type a given system represents but which of a given contrasting emphasis is...
References Gmj
Ablon, J. 1984 . Little people in America. New York Praeger. Ablon, J. 1996 . Gender response to neurofibromatosis 1. Social Science amp Medicine, 42, 99-109. Ablon, J. 1999 . Living with genetic disorder The impact of neurofibromatosis 1. Westport, CT Auburn House. Abu-Lughod, L. 1991 . Writing against culture. In R. G. Fox Ed. , Recapturing anthropology Working in the present. Santa Fe, NM School of American Research. Adams, V. 1998 . Suffering the winds of Lhasa Politicized bodies, human...
phratry A unilineal descent group composed of a number of supposedly related
plague. In the broadest sense can be any epidemic disease that causes high mortality. pneumonia. Inflammation of the lungs with congestion. political ecology. An ecological approach that considers economic, social and political factors. political economy. The study of how external forces, particularly powerful state societies, explain the way a society changes and adapts. pollution. A set of beliefs and ideas that suggest that a category of persons e.g., women a certain caste may be dangerous...
Theoretical Orientations and Methods in Nutritional Anthropology
As with other fields of anthropology a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and methods are used in nutritional anthropology. A range of ecological, symbolic, materialist, and political perspectives has been used to explain patterns of food selection, nutritional consequences, and the relationships of nutrition to sociocultural, economic, and ecological processes. What foods people eat and how much they eat are determined not simply by physiological needs, but also by political and...
vodou See voodoo vodoun See voodoo
voodoo. A religion that focuses on contacting and appeasing spirits to help and protect people voodoo attributes illness to angry ancestors. Many ceremonies focus on divination to find the cause of illness, rites of healing, propitiation of spirits in which offerings are given, and sacrifices to prevent future trouble. Voodoo is the major religion of Haiti. Also spelled vodou or vodoun. warfare. Violence between political entities such as communities, districts, or nations. western medicine....
New Reproductive Technologies and New Forms of Kinship
A large literature exists on the anthropology of birth and the technologies associated with birth practices see the entry Medicalization and the Naturalization of Social Control for a review of some of this research . Research has also demonstrated the lengths to which women are driven to try to overcome infertility Inhorn, 1994 Kielmann, 1998 . Much of this research, like many of the materials cited above, highlight the global, local, political, and economic strategies associated with the...
Baker P. T. J. M. Hanna And T. S. Baker. The Changing Samoans Behavior And
Allen, J. S., amp Cheer, S. M. 1996 . The non-thrifty genotype. Current Anthropology, 37, 831-842. American Diabetes Association 2002a . Expert committee on the diagnosis and classification of diabetes mellitus Report to the expert committee on the diagnosis and classification of diabetes mellitus . Diabetes Care, 25 Suppl. 1 , S5-S20. American Diabetes Association 2002b . Diabetes among Native Americans. Retrieved 2002 from the American Diabetes Association Website . www.diabetes.org Baier, L....
ASC Bases of Shamanistic Therapies
Therapeutic mechanisms of ASC involve parasympa-thetic dominance, interhemispheric synchronization, and limbic-frontal integration Winkelman, 1992, 1996, 1997, 2000 . These physiological processes facilitate healing through a variety of mechanisms, including inducing physiological relaxation and reducing tension and stress regulation and balance of psychophysiological processes reducing anxiety and phobic reactions and psychosomatic effects accessing normally unconscious information enhancing...
Conclusion Hpl
With the global aging of populations, the worldwide impact of age-related chronic diseases on quality of life and societal resources will continue to grow throughout the 21st century. The holistic and cross-cultural perspective of anthropology, including biological and sociocultural research, has much to offer in terms of identifying genetic and environmental risk factors for these diseases and examining the cultural patterning of values, meanings, and activities related to older adults with...
References Lnh
Bauer, M. C., amp Wright, A. L. 1996 . Integrating qualitative and quantitative methods to model infant feeding behavior among Navajo mothers. Human Organization, 55, 183-192. Boster, J. S. 1980 . How the exceptions prove the rule Aguaruna plant classification Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1980 . Bruner, J. 1986 . Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. 1990 . Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press. Cain, C....
References Giq
Barnett, T., amp Blaikie, P. 1992 . How households, families and communities cope with AIDS. In T. Barnett amp P. Blaikie Eds. , AIDS in Africa Its present and future impact pp. 86-109 . London Belhaven Press. Beyene, Y. 1989 . From menarche to menopause Reproductive lives of peasant women in two cultures. Albany, NY SUNY Press. Birke, L., Himmelweit, S., amp Vines, G. 1990 . Tomorrow's child Reproductive technologies in the 90s. London Virago. Boddy, J. 1982 . Womb as oasis The symbolic...
References Ova
Alexander, L. 1981 . Double-bind between dialysis patients and the health practitioners. In L. Eisenberg amp A. Kleinman Eds. , The relevance of social science for medicine. Dordrecht, The Netherlands Reidel. Alexander, L. 1982 . Illness maintenance and the new American sick role. In N. Chrisman amp T. Maretzki Eds. , Clinically applied anthropology Anthropologists in health science settings. Dordrecht, The Netherlands Reidel. Baer, H. A. 1989 . The American dominative medical system as a...
Aging Elderhood and Old Age
From a biological standpoint aging involves structural and functional changes over time, both maturational and senescent, which normally occur among males and females when they pass puberty. Maturing over a prolonged life span is one of the species-specific traits of Homo sapiens Crews amp Garruto, 1994 . While most other primates live in multi-aged communities, only human societies have developed systems that require high levels of prolonged material and social interdependence between...
Shamanic ASC
Ecstasy, trance, or ASC are central to selection, training, and practice, and induced through many procedures that have physiological effects Winkelman, 1986b, 1992, 2000 cf. below . Shamanic ASC occur in a dramatic ritual encounter within the spirit world. After extensive singing, chanting, drumming, and dancing, shamans collapse into apparent unconsciousness, but have an intact memory of the ensuing visionary experience upon returning to ordinary reality. Shamans experience flying to other...
Strategies toward the Elimination of FGC Does Meaning Matter
Identifying the most effective and appropriate strategies for eliminating FGC is among the most bitterly contested issues surrounding this practice, and the choice of approach determines the importance of understanding the cultural construction of meaning. Two established paradigms for combating FGC are the moral model and the disease model. In the moral model, FGC is condemned and often criminalized, while motives and meanings of the practice are deemed irrelevant. This approach can be traced...