Chapter 15 Flashcards
(24 cards)
What is medical anthropology?
An area of cultural anthropology that examines human health and ways that humans populations perceive and react to disease and illness
What is health?
A sense of physical, emotional, and mental well-being shaped by cultural, social, and political experiences and expretations
What is suffering?
That physical, mental, or emotional distress associated with a disease, which extends beyond a traditional Western biomedical focus that views biological functioning only
What is sickness?
How members of a particular cultural community recognize and classify physical, mental, and emotional distress
What is culture-bound syndromes?
Types of sickness that are unique to a particular cultural group
What is Illness?
The suffering person’s own understanding of his or her distress
What is medical anthropology?
Focus on the biological and cultural context of human sickness and health through the lens of illness
What are the patterns of sickness and health?
- Demography (statistical study of populations
- Epidemiology (study of the distribution of disease and explanations foe the distributions
What is epidemic?
Diseases spread quickly through a population over a short time period
What is endemic?
Diseaese are always present and therefore, common in a population
What is syndemic?
approches examine how diseases in a population are affected by stressful environmental factors such as:
- Poor nutrition
- Social instability
- Violence
What are Cultural explanations for sickness?
- Biomedical causes
- Witchcraft or sorcery
- Punishment by ancestors for breaking taboos
What are biomedical accounts
accept only material causes for ill health
What is biomedical understandings?
Define ill-health as disease caused by material entities located inside human bodies
What is medical anthropology?
Recognize that ill health may be caused by cultural factors located outside the body,depending on how one views their experience in the world
What is unified and integrated selves?
Views of self as bounded and centered
What is decentered selves?
view of self as open to wider world (sometimes through spiritual discipline) and thus, less bound and self-contained
What is medical anthropology based on?
- The view that culture mediates humans experiences
- The recognition that cultural systems, including medical systems, are symbolic systems
What do medical anthropologist argue?
Beliefs and practices about sickness and health are best understood in their own symbolic cultural context
What is illness narratives?
- Explanations that people from different cultures develop to explain the source of their suffering
- One way to explore the symbolic dimensions of human suffering ans can be created by suffering and caregivers
What are subject positions?
All individuals are in social positions marked by social, political, and economic inequality with the poorest and least powerful member of society often subjected to highly intensified risk
What is structural volence?
results from the way political and economic forces structes risk for various forms of suffering, which can include:
- Infectious and parasitic diseases
- Hunger
- Torture
- Rape
What historical context include?
- European colonial domination
- Institution of racial slavery
- Organization of indigenous groups into a hierarchy favoring colonizer over colonized
- expansion of global capitalism
What is cosmopolitan medicine?
Biomedical breakthrough mediated by technological innovations and interventions are welcomed by medical anthropologist
