Health, Healing and Culture

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Health, Healing and Culture
Anthropology 140

• An Introductory, Anthropological
• Perspective

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Anthropology and Healing

• Cross-cultural understanding
• Cross-historical understanding
• With an understanding of culture from an
  anthropological perspective
• With a view toward cultural relativism
• Looking critically at Western Medicine in the
  process

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Culture From an Anthropological Perspective

• Culture as webs of meaning
• Patterns of and for behavior
• Culture as integrated and interwoven
• Culture as holistic
• Culture filters, proscribes and prescribes
• Culture gives meaning and creates order

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Healing and Anthropology Key Approaches

• Anthropology studies historically
• comparatively
• holistically
• to understand cultures in context, in and for
  themselves

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Exploring Medical Anthropology (text 1)
Donald
Joralemon

• What is cultural About Disease?
• Culture in medicine
• Disease in other cultures and times
• Development of Medical Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology Today

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Exploring Medical Anthropology (text 1)
Donald
Joralemon

• Anthropological Questions .
• Ecological/evolutionary
• Interpretive
• Critical
• Applied
• And Methods
• Fieldwork
• Participant observation

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Exploring Medical Anthropology (text 1)
Donald
Joralemon

• Recognizing Connections .
• Biological (including environmental)
• Social
• Cultural
• Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives...
• Applied to the study of cholera

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Exploring Medical Anthropology (text 1)
Donald
Joralemon

• Critical and Interpretive Views...
• Critical..
• Political and economic dimensions shaping health
  and healing (globally)
• Interpretive..
• A meaning centered approach to understanding
  disease, health and healing

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Exploring Medical Anthropology (text 1)
Donald
Joralemon

• Healers and healing professions.
• Roles
• Relationships
• Authority (cultural and otherwise)
• Including an understanding of these in relation
  to biomedicine

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Exploring Medical Anthropology (text 1)
Donald
Joralemon

• Applying Medical Anthropology
• contexts
• types
• issues
• history
• Critical view of Applied approach
• medicine, power and politics

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Other Key Questions

• Ethnocentrism
• Cultural Relativism
• Western Medical Model
• Body-Mind Dualism
• Understanding world practices
• (your projects)

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Health and the Rise of Civilization
Mark Cohen

• Which approach does this book take?
• What is he saying about health and the rise of
  civilization?

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Health and the Rise of Civilization
Mark Cohen

• Takes what Joraleman calls an ecological
  approach
• looking at the relationship of health, to
  environment
• and the role of human patterns of behavior
  (culture) in shaping both

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Health and the Rise of Civilization
Mark Cohen

• Cohen cautions
• not to over-idealize or romanticize early
  humans
• not present modern health as totally bad
• Instead, what we call civilization has been a
  mixed picture as was what preceded it

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Health and the Rise of Civilization
Mark Cohen

• Cohen spells out some of the settlement patterns
  and practices that have led to new diseases
• patterns that put humans in contact with
  previously non-threatening vectors of disease
• And new patterns of food-getting (and
  processing) that have done the same...

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Health and the Rise of Civilization
Mark Cohen

• Cohen also spells out some of the advances in
  human health-technology that have improved
  well-being, at the same time.
• Likewise, he points out indicators that present a
  picture of longer human survival, better
  treatment of illness etc.

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Health and the Rise of Civilization
Mark Cohen

• Cohens cautions are echoed in Kent Redfords
  article
• The Ecologically Noble Savage. Survival
  Quarterly, Vol15, No.1, pp. 46-48.

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Woman as Healer
Jeanne Achterberg

• What is J. Achterbergs approach in her book
  Woman as Healer?
• What is the key point of her book?
• And how is she making her argument(s)?
• What types of evidence and arguments is she using
  to get her point(s) across?