Midterm

Question 1

Characteristics of Culture

Answer 1

Shared, learned, transgenerational, patterned, adaptive, and symbolic.

Question 2

Shared (characteristic of culture)

Answer 2

Shared–culture does not exist solely in the mind of one individial but is shared among multiple people, not everyone has the same culture, we approach and participate in it as individuals, there are differences within any particular ‘cultural community

Question 3

Learned (characteristic of culture)

Answer 3

we learn cultural rules in the same way we learn language, people who share a culture have similar experiences which helps develop mental structures that enable them to process these experiences, we are shaped through our interactions with others

Question 4

Transgenerational (characteristic of culture)

Answer 4

extends beyond an individuals life-time, we produce books, stories, paintings, architecture and other material objects that serve to pass on knowledge to future generations, culture is changes and is transformed through time. Culture is not static

Question 5

Patterned (characteristic of culture)

Answer 5

within a given culture we observe behaviours that recur in a similar way. Rituals both reflect and transmit a culture’s norms—or patterned behaviours—and other elements from one generation to the next. They both transmit and reflect norms.

Question 6

Adaptive (characteristic of culture)

Answer 6

culture is constantly acting in reacting in relation to societal and environmental changes. The dynamic nature of culture is sometimes overlooked. Culture all too often portrayed as static, unchanging

Question 7

Symbolic (characteristic of culture)

Answer 7

Every culture is filled with symbols, or things that stand for something else and that often evoke various reactions and emotions. Shared symbols make social interaction possible

Question 8

3 bodies

Answer 8

Individual body, social body, and body politic

Question 9

Individual body

Answer 9

lived experience of the body-self. We all share some intuitive sense of the embodied self as existing apart from other individual bodies. The constituent parts of the body are highly variable.

Question 10

Social body

Answer 10

representational uses of the body as a natural symbol with which to think about nature, society, and culture. There is constant exchange of meanings between the “natural” and the social worlds.

Question 11

Body politic

Answer 11

the regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies (individual and collective) in reproduction and sexuality, in work and in leisure, in sickness and other forms of deviance and human difference. The stability of the body politic rests on its ability to regulate populations and to discipline individual bodies

Question 12

The body-self

Answer 12

The ‘body-self’: the self-consciousness of mind and body, a sense of awareness of mind/body integration and of ‘being in the world’ as separate and apart from other human. Things we do like opening the door are so reflexive that you just do it without thinking,

Question 13

Individual/collective/partible selves and persons

Answer 13

we cannot assume that the individual is the fundamental unit of identity or health

Question 14

Person and personhood

Answer 14

understandings and rules regarding how and individual will be represented and treated, the degree of autonomy/dependency they will have in relation to others.

Ideas of personhood often involve a trajectory, it is cumulative over time you gather elements of yourselves.

Question 15

Society

Answer 15

How social relations are organised or structured is shaped

by culture, power and history

Question 16

Two interconnected concepts help to bridge between three bodies

Answer 16

Structural violence

Social suffering

Question 17

Structural violence

Answer 17

which is social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world, violent because they cause injury to people

Question 18

Social suffering

Answer 18

¬ social suffering is that embodied experience of structural violence is how individuals experience violence inflicted upon them by the societal structures that disadvantage them on the basis of such characteristics of race, class, gender, religion etc. Suffering is social when it’s patterned by structural violence so that it affects whole categories of people.

Question 19

Medical anthropology approaches

Answer 19

3 E’s

Question 20

3 E’s

Answer 20

¬ Epidemiology: views disease in ecological terms as interaction between pathogen, host and environment
¬ Evolutionary approaches: focuses on genetics, environment and human agency
¬ Ecological model: considers organism and their total environment in order to understand how a disease develops and spreads through a population. Their broad view of environment includes political, social, and ecological aspects

Question 21

Health

Answer 21

Absence of disease.
A state of complete physical, mental,
and social well-being and not merely
the absence of disease or infirmity.

Question 22

Disease

Answer 22

“Abnormalities in the structure and function of body organs and
systems”

Question 23

Illness

Answer 23

”The human experience of sickness”

Illness is a feeling, an experience of ‘unhealth’ which is
entirely personal, interior to the person of the patient.
Includes the meaning that this experience bears on the person

Question 24

Evolutionary approach

Answer 24

Concept of adaptation
Focus on ability of organisms to reproduce in spite of threats in certain
environmental contexts.
§Any genetically governed characteristic(s) that provides a selective advantage
will be expressed more frequently over time because those with the traits more
often live longer to pass on their genes.
§Variation is the prerequisite for evolutionary change
Ultimate source for variation is mutation

Question 25

Culture bound syndrome

Answer 25

”a health problem with a set of symptoms associated with a particular culture” ”set of symptoms” is usually a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms that are considered to be a recognizable diseases only with a particular culture/society

Question 26

Inclusive approaches (critical approach)

Answer 26

Understand patterns of disease in particular socio-economic and political settings. §Apply notion of ‘syndemics’ to analyse the intersecting risks that have have an impact on human health §Asses the health promoting resources available in any given community understood as biomedical, social, cultural, legal. §Find ways of better integrating different medical anthropological perspectives §Focus on the concepts of ‘structural violence’ and ‘social suffering’ as means of ‘bridging the gap’ between ‘three bodies’: §Body politic is the locus of structural violence, body social where violence is symbolically manipulated and individual body where social suffering is experiences.

Question 27

Ecological approach

Answer 27

¬ Epidemiology views disease in ecological terms as the interaction between a pathogen(s) and its host(s)