Tag Archives: Medical Anthropology

Lectures

Medical anthropology applied to education in socio-health professions: From the enchantment of technology to the enchantment of the encounter

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“If you want to understand what a science is, you should look for the first instance not at its theories and its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it, you should look  at what the practitioners of it do,” wrote Clifford Geertz (1973, p.311). To contribute to the continuous redefinition of medical anthropology, we will present …

Features

Emergent Anthropology: Reimagining U.S. Medical Anthropology in Theory and Practice

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The American Anthropological Association website identifies four subfields of anthropology (archaeology, biological, cultural, linguistic) and reserves a separate section for “applied and practicing anthropology.” In our collective experience, we have found this division between ostensibly “academic” and “applied” anthropology problematic, as it limits the possibilities of a broadly conceptualized and enacted medical anthropology that is more continuous than categorical. We …

Lectures

Doing and Seeing: Cultivating a “Fractured Habitus” through Reflexive Clinician Ethnography

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Introduction

The tension between critical theoretical innovation and on-the-ground, practical application has animated intense debate in medical anthropology (Scheper-Hughes 1990). Epistemological and methodological conflicts cropping up at the intersection of medicine and anthropology, though central considerations for all medical anthropologists, represent an inescapable source of tension for MD/PhD clinician-ethnographers. While innovative manuscripts produced by such scholars (Wendland 2019) have illustrated …

Lectures

The Thinness of Care: The Promise of Medical Anthropology in MD/PhD Training

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In the mid-twentieth century, recognizing the growing need for innovations born of clinical experience, pathways for training MD-PhD physician-scientists emerged in the hopes that this hybrid training could produce novel insights into disease and ultimately, treatments. In the years since formal MD/PhD training programs were established, a growing number of institutions have established pathways for a combination with non-traditional disciplines, …

Lectures

Medical Anthropology and Practice of Medicine in Health Issues

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Abstract: It is known through anthropological literature that African countries are distinguished by a category of medicine that many specialists call ethnomedicine or traditional African medicine. Faced with biomedicine, ethnomedicine has often been relegated to the background in the resolution of health-related problems. However, ethnomedicine resurfaces in African countries, particularly in Cameroon, when there is no biomedical solution to a …

Lectures

Disrupting medical anthropology: Views from Kenya and Cameroon on how to build a more inclusive discipline

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Medical anthropologists often strive to disrupt typical public health and medical discourses, in part by questioning the broader applicability of individualized psychological concepts and biomedical diagnoses outside of the small, privileged Western circles from which these constructs originate (Henrich et al. 2010). However, within our own discipline, access to theoretical innovations and conversations remain decidedly siloed and one-sided. Scholars have …