Download or read book An Anthropology of Biomedicine written by Margaret M. Lock and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down. Introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics Develops and integrates an original theory: that the human body in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable, malleable entity Makes extensive use of historical and contemporary ethnographic materials around the globe to illustrate the importance of this methodological approach Integrates key new research data with more classical material, covering the management of epidemics, famines, fertility and birth, by military doctors from colonial times on Uses numerous case studies to illustrate concepts such as the global commodification of human bodies and body parts, modern forms of population, and the extension of biomedical technologies into domestic and intimate domains Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and Anthropology

Download or read book An Anthropology of Biomedicine written by Margaret Lock and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down. Introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics Develops and integrates an original theory: that the human body in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable, malleable entity Makes extensive use of historical and contemporary ethnographic materials around the globe to illustrate the importance of this methodological approach Integrates key new research data with more classical material, covering the management of epidemics, famines, fertility and birth, by military doctors from colonial times on Uses numerous case studies to illustrate concepts such as the global commodification of human bodies and body parts, modern forms of population, and the extension of biomedical technologies into domestic and intimate domains Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and Anthropology

Download or read book Biomedicine Examined written by M. Lock and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The culture of contemporary medicine is the object of investigation in this book; the meanings and values implicit in biomedical knowledge and practice and the social processes through which they are produced are examined through the use of specific case studies. The essays provide examples of how various facets of 20th century medicine, including edu cation, research, the creation of medical knowledge, the development and application of technology, and day to day medical practice, are per vaded by a value system characteristic of an industrial-capitalistic view of the world in which the idea that science represents an objective and value free body of knowledge is dominant. The authors of the essays are sociologists and anthropologists (in almost equal numbers); also included are papers by a social historian and by three physicians all of whom have steeped themselves in the social sci ences and humanities. This co-operative endeavor, which has necessi tated the breaking down of disciplinary barriers to some extent, is per haps indicative of a larger movement in the social sciences, one in which there is a searching for a middle ground between grand theory and attempts at universal explanations on the one hand, and the context-spe cific empiricism and relativistic accounts characteristic of many historical and anthropological analyses on the other.

Download or read book Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America written by Hans A. Baer and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining medical pluralism in the United States from the Revolutionary War period through the end of the twentieth century, Hans Baer brings together in one convenient reference a vast array of information on healing systems as diverse as Christian Science, osteopathy, acupuncture, Santeria, southern Appalachian herbalism, evangelical faith healing, and Navajo healing. In a country where the dominant paradigm of biomedicine (medical schools, research hospitals, clinics staffed by M.D.s and R.N.s) has been long established and supported by laws and regulations, the continuing appeal of other medical systems and subsystems bears careful consideration. Distinctions of class, Baer emphasizes, as well as differences in race, ethnicity, and gender, are fundamental to the diversity of beliefs, techniques, and social organizations represented in the phenomenon of medical pluralism. Baer traces the simultaneous emergence in the nineteenth century of formalized biomedicine and of homeopathy, botanic medicine, hydropathy, Christian Science, osteopathy, and chiropractic. He examines present-day osteopathic medicine as a system parallel to biomedicine with an emphasis on primary care; chiropractic, naturopathy, and acupuncture as professionalized heterodox medical systems; homeopathy, herbalism, bodywork, and lay midwifery in the context of the holistic health movement; Anglo-American religious healing; and folk medical systems, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. In closing he focuses on the persistence of folk medical systems among working-class Americans and considers the growing interest of biomedical physicians, pharmaceutical and healthcare corporations, and government in the holistic health movement

Download or read book Biomedical Entanglements written by Franziska A. Herbst and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.

Download or read book Evidence Ethos and Experiment written by P. Wenzel Geissler and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the “trial communities” produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.

Download or read book Medicine Rationality and Experience written by Byron J. Good and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.

Download or read book The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine written by Anamaria Iosif Ross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternative medicine is not a fashionable new trend but an established cultural strategy, as well as a dynamic feature of mainstream contemporary medicine, in which elements of folk traditions are often blended with western scientific approaches.The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine is a concise yet wide-ranging exploration of non-biomedical healing. The book addresses a broad range of practices including: substance, energy and information flows (e.g. helminthic therapy); spirit, consciousness and trance (e.g. shamanism); body, movement and the senses (e.g. reiki and aromatherapy); as well as classical medical traditions as complements or alternatives to Western biomedicine (e.g. Ayurveda). Exploring the cultural underpinnings of contemporary healing methods, while assessing current ideas, topics and resources for further study, this book will be invaluable to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and health related professions such as nursing, physical and occupational therapy, and biomedicine.

Download or read book Biomedicine as Culture written by Regula Valérie Burri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-21 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary biomedicine as a cultural practice. It brings together leading scholars from cultural anthropology, sociology, history, and science studies to conduct a critical dialogue on the culture(s) of biomedical practice, discussing its epistemic, material, and social implications. The essays look at the ways new biomedical knowledge is constructed within hospitals and academic settings and at how this knowledge changes perceptions, material arrangements, and social relations, not only within clinics and scientific communities, but especially once it is diffused into a broader cultural context.

Download or read book Medical Anthropology written by Pool, Robert and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to the basic concepts, approaches and theories used, and shows how these contribute to understanding complex health related behaviour. Public health policies and interventions are more likely to be effective if the beliefs and behaviour of people are understood and taken into account.

Download or read book Biomedicine in an Unstable Place written by Alice Street and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2014-10-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biomedicine in an Unstable Place is the story of people's struggle to make biomedicine work in a public hospital in Papua New Guinea. It is a story encompassing the history of hospital infrastructures as sites of colonial and postcolonial governance, the simultaneous production of Papua New Guinea as a site of global medical research and public health, and people's encounters with urban institutions and biomedical technologies. In Papua New Guinea, a century of state building has weakened already inadequate colonial infrastructures, and people experience the hospital as a space of institutional, medical, and ontological instability. In the hospital's clinics, biomedical practitioners struggle amid severe resource shortages to make the diseased body visible and knowable to the clinical gaze. That struggle is entangled with attempts by doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to external others—to kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers—as socially recognizable and valuable persons. Here hospital infrastructures emerge as relational technologies that are fundamentally fragile but also offer crucial opportunities for making people visible and knowable in new, unpredictable, and powerful ways.

Download or read book Writing at the Margin written by Arthur Kleinman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-08-15 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems—for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain—are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics. Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.

Download or read book A Companion to Medical Anthropology written by Merrill Singer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Medical Anthropology examines the current issues, controversies, and state of the field in medical anthropology today. Provides an expert view of the major topics and themes to concern the discipline since its founding in the 1960s Written by leading international scholars in medical anthropology Covers environmental health, global health, biotechnology, syndemics, nutrition, substance abuse, infectious disease, and sexuality and reproductive health, and other topics

Download or read book The Anthropology of Epidemics written by Ann H. Kelly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decades, infectious disease epidemics have come to increasingly pose major global health challenges to humanity. The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impact on social life whilst at the same time functioning as catalysts of shifts and ruptures as regards human/non-human relations. Bearing a particular mark on subject areas and questions which have recently come to shape developments in anthropological thinking, the volume brings epidemics to the forefront of anthropological debate, as an exemplary arena for social scientific study and analysis.

Download or read book A Reader in Medical Anthropology written by Byron J. Good and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-03-22 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities brings together articles from the key theoretical approaches in the field of medical anthropology as well as related science and technology studies. The editors’ comprehensive introductions evaluate the historical lineages of these approaches and their value in addressing critical problems associated with contemporary forms of illness experience and health care. Presents a key selection of both classic and new agenda-setting articles in medical anthropology Provides analytic and historical contextual introductions by leading figures in medical anthropology, medical sociology, and science and technology studies Critically reviews the contribution of medical anthropology to a new global health movement that is reshaping international health agendas

Download or read book Healing Roots written by Julie Laplante and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-02-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Umhlonyane, also known as Artemisia afra, is one of the oldest and best-documented indigenous medicines in South Africa. This bush, which grows wild throughout the sub-Saharan region, smells and tastes like “medicine,” thus easily making its way into people’s lives and becoming the choice of everyday healing for Xhosa healer-diviners and Rastafarian herbalists. This “natural” remedy has recently sparked curiosity as scientists search for new molecules against a tuberculosis pandemic while hoping to recognize indigenous medicine. Laplante follows umhlonyane on its trails and trials of becoming a biopharmaceutical — from the “open air” to controlled environments — learning from the plant and from the people who use it with hopes in healing.

Download or read book Anthropology in Public Health written by Robert A. Hahn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural and social boundaries often separate those who participate in public health activities, and it is a major challenge to translate public health knowledge and technical capacity into public health action across these boundaries. This book provides an overview of anthropology and illustrates in 15 case studies how anthropological concepts and methods can help us understand and resolve diverse public health problems around the world. For example, one chapter shows how differences in concepts and terminology among patients, clinicians, and epidemiologists in a southwestern U.S. county hinder the control of epidemics. Another chapter examines reasons that Mexican farmers don't use protective equipment when spraying pesticides and suggests ways to increase use. Another examines the culture of international health agencies, demonstrates institutional values and practices that impede effective public health practice, and suggests issues that must be addressed to enhance institutional organization and process.; Each chapter characterizes a public health problem, describes methods used to analyse it, reviews results, and discusses implications; several chapters also describe and evaluate programs designed to address the problem on the basis of anthropological knowledge. The book provides practical models and indicates anthropological tools to translate public health knowledge and technical capacity into public health action.