medical anthropology research questions

Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology is the study of how health and illness are shaped, experienced, and understood in the context of cultural, historical, and political forces. It is one of the most exciting subfields of anthropology and has increasingly clear relevance for students and professionals interested in the complexity of disease states, diagnostic categories, and what comes to count as pathology or health.

At Stanford some of our principal areas of inquiry include cultures of medicine, the social nature of emergent biotechnology, the economics of bodily injury, psychic expressions of disorder, the formation of social networks on health, the lived experience of disability and inequality, caregiving, and ever-changing concepts of human biological difference and race. We work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in addition to the United States and its borderlands. We engage with patients, health scientists, and larger publics at home and abroad in order to contribute to a more robust understanding of the way  poverty, social status, war, racism, and nationalism produce illness and disease. We look both at the broad forces of structural violence and the microphenomenology of pain and suffering. Our program seeks students who creatively imagine interdisciplinary approaches to health questions, wish to increase dialogue with medical professionals, and aim to rethink operative principles within science and medicine.

Our core group of faculty includes:

Angela Garcia: Professor Garcia’s work explores political, economic and psychic processes through which illness and suffering is produced and lived. Through long-term ethnographic research with poor families and communities struggling with multigenerational experiences of addiction, depression, and incarceration, she draws attention to emerging forms of care and kinship, accounts of cultural history and subjectivities, and relations of affect and intimacy, that are essential to understanding health and life. Working in the United States and Mexico, her work also demonstrates the urgent need for drug law reform and new approaches to ethics and therapeutics as they concern suffering in shared and transgressive formations.

Duana Fullwiley: Professor Fullwiley explores how global and historical notions of health, disease, race, and power yield biological consequences that bear on scientific definitions of human difference. Through an ethnographic engagement with geneticists and the populations they study, she underscores the importance of expanding the conceptual terrain of genetic causation to include poverty and on-going racial stratification. She explicitly writes in the long histories of inequality and dispossession suffered by global minorities that often go missing from medical narratives of genetic disease and ideas of “population-based” severity. Working in France, West Africa and the United States, she details the legacy effects of postcolonial, post-Reconstruction, and Progressive Era science policies on present-day health outcomes. She also chronicles the remnants of racial thinking in new population genetic research and works with scientists to redress them.

Lochlann Jain: Professor Jain's research is primarily concerned with the ways in which stories get told about injuries, how they are thought to be caused, and how that matters. Figuring out the political and social significance of these stories has led to the study of law, product design, medical error, and histories of engineering, regulation, corporations, and advertising.

Matthew Kohrman: Professor Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.

Tanya Luhrmann: Professor Luhrmann has long standing interests in schizophrenia, with work on homeless, poverty, and social defeat. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people with psychosis who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, the relationship between the voices of madness and the voices of spirit, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing.

What sets this program apart?

An engaged orientation

Our group at Stanford believes that anthropological analysis is not just for anthropologists and not just for the classroom. It matters elsewhere. Whether it is cancer, psychiatric disease, drug addiction, injury and disability, racialized health disparities, genetic disorders or the leading cause of premature death, tobacco, we tackle issues of great importance for people the world over. In addressing the societal and bodily aspects of these problems, we encourage our students to work with affected communities, medical professionals, basic scientists, patient advocates, and health NGOs while aiming to reach even larger publics.

The goal of our work is to advance the field of anthropology, which is the disciplinary home of medical anthropology, but to do so in ways that also advance thinking within broader intellectual communities. The field of medical anthropology addresses afflictions of increasing importance that are seldom sufficiently understood by biomedicine alone. Much of our work focuses on how health problems arise from larger social issues, which must also be addressed. As we strive to dissolve the stark divides between the life and the social sciences, we work in the spirit that cross-disciplinary conversations are possible and necessary to achieve effective medicine, humane healing, and ethical science. In this vein, we encourage our students to publish in the flagship journals of anthropology but also in relevant health science and more popular mainstream venues.

Theory and Methods

We are steadfast in our commitment to ethnography, affirming its empirical merits and value for theory building. We also realize that some research questions benefit from other methods, including statistical reporting, demographic observations, and survey techniques. In its specifics, training in our program includes courses in anthropological theory, the anthropology of science and technology, psychiatric anthropology, and various area foci where specific health problems are more prevalent for geo-political reasons. We expose students to these diverse approaches to allow them to contribute innovatively to anthropology as well as to a broader set of audiences. To facilitate this work, we also collaborate with Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), the Center for International Studies (FSI), the Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry, the Department of Psychology, and the program on Science and Technology Studies (STS).

Duana Fullwiley

Angela Garcia

Lochlann Jain

Matthew Kohrman

Tanya Marie Luhrmann

79 Medical Anthropology Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best medical anthropology topic ideas & essay examples, 📃 interesting topics to write about medical anthropology, 🔍 simple & easy medical anthropology essay titles, ❓ medical anthropology research questions.

• Medical Anthropology An analysis of the power relations affecting biomedicine addresses questions such as who has the power over agencies of biomedicine, how and in what forms power is to be delegated, how the power is to […]
• Water Contamination Issue in Medical Anthropology The role of water is so important that any economic or political disturbance can result in the worsening health problems of the population. The most recent and evident example of the failure in disease management […]
• Analysis of a News Article Through the Lens of Medical Anthropology To begin with, before referring the writing’s content to the concepts studied in the medical anthropology class, it is necessary to review and summarize the news article.
• Medical Anthropology: Teammates in the Support of Justice, Diversity, and Inclusion This presentation provides information about Stronger Together, the company supporting the needs of this group of the population.
• Medical Anthropology. Female Genital Mutilation Never the less it is universally unacceptable because it is an infringement on the physical and psychosexual integrity of women and girls and is a form of violence against them.
• Medical Anthropology and Its Subfields Medical anthropology is the science of ethnomedicine; elucidation of decease; what is the reason of decease; the appraisal of health, decease, and cure from both an ethic viewpoint; naturalistic and individual clarification, evil eye, the […]
• Medical Anthropology. Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You Taylor is one of the book admirers who says that the tragic story of a poor girl and the consequences of the cultural clash “catch you and you fall down”.
• Medical Anthropology for Solving Health Problems In Singer and Baer’s book, anthropology is viewed as a critical component of the medical sphere, helping to define reasons for a person’s health or non-health problems.
• Medical Anthropology: Global Warming and Health According to Singer and Baer, corporate globalization has the most negative effect on human health as it influences the creation of global warming and contributes to the spread of severe diseases such as cancer and […]
• Medical Anthropology. HIV&AIDS Preventive Measures Since the detection of the first case of HIV in India, the government introduced both surveillance and preventative plans to reduce the risk of the disease spread.
• Medical Anthropology: Health Inequality Issue In the United States, the terms of health inequalities and health disparities label the substantially disturbing differences in the quality of medical treatment for white Americans and African Americans.
• Medical Anthropology: Religious, Spiritual and Magical Beliefs This refers to the way of the universe, the way of humans, the way of nature, and finally transcends to the way to unite together in the essential harmony of all organisms.
• Approaches to Human Illness From a Biomedical Anthropology Perspective In a sense, the biocultural view fronted by Stanford and company can be used to explain the article’s main theme of inequality and human illness as it recognize the fact that both our evolutionary and […]
• Medical Anthropology: Analysis of Culture and Medicine
• The U.S. Urban Poor Health Crisis: Perspective of Critical Medical Anthropology
• Applied Medical Anthropology: Towards a Holistic Medical Approach
• Beyond the Anglophone World: Medical Anthropology in the Netherlands
• Cultural Competency and Health: Applying Medical Anthropology
• The Link Between Culture and Health Applying Medical Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology Cultural Conflicts Hierarchy and Problems of Mental
• The Relations Between Medical Anthropology, Health, Psychology, and Medical Sociology
• Reinventing Medical Anthropology: Toward a Critical Realignment
• The Body, Meaning, and Symbols in Medical Anthropology
• The Partnership of Public Health and Anthropology
• Critically Assessing the Fundamental Posts of Critical Medical Anthropology
• Exploring the Applications of Ethnobotany in Medical Anthropology
• Biosocial Worlds: Anthropology of Health Environments Beyond Determinism
• Anthropology and International Health: Asian Case Studies
• Distinction Between Health and Illness in Context With the Medical Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology: How Political Economy Relates to the Issue of Social Suffering
• The Analysis of the Importance of Medical Anthropology in the Modern World
• Medical Anthropology: Pluralistic and Ethnomedicine Modalities in a Healing Process
• Public Health Anthropology: Concepts and Tools
• How to Apply Public Health Anthropology in Practice
• Medical Anthropology: The Definition and History of Medical Anthropology
• Overview of Interpretive or Meaning-Centered Medical Anthropology
• The Relationships Between Psychological Anthropology and Mental Health
• The Role of Medical Anthropology in the Healthcare System
• Analyzing Global Perspectives on Women’s Health Anthropology
• Advanced Studies in the Anthropology of Health Inequality
• Anthropology of Health in Brazil: A Border Discourse
• Applying Medicine Anthropology Theory Into Practice
• Medical Anthropology or Anthropology of Health: Methods and Approaches
• Critical and Clinical Engagement in Medical Anthropology Applications
• Towards a Critical Medical Anthropology of Health‐Related Issues in Socialist‐Oriented Societies
• Analysis of History and Scope of Medical Anthropology
• A Pathographic Account of Health Anthropology’s Relevance
• Analysis of the Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health
• Producing Medical Anthropology in Central and Eastern Europe
• Doing Applied Medical Anthropology in Australia and Malaysia
• Overview of the Medical and Global Health Anthropology
• The Problem of the Misconstruction of Critical Medical Anthropology
• The Link Between Medical Anthropology and Mental Health
• What Does a Medical Anthropologist Do?
• What Is an Example of Medical Anthropology?
• What Is Medical Anthropology Anthropology?
• Are Medical Anthropologists Doctors?
• Is Medical Anthropology a Good Major?
• What Is the Future of Medical Anthropology?
• Is Medical Anthropology a Stem Major?
• What Can You Do With Medical Anthropology?
• Where Do Medical Anthropologists Work?
• Who Is the Father of Medical Anthropology?
• Who Is a Famous Medical Anthropologist?
• Do Medical Anthropologists Travel?
• Who Hires a Medical Anthropologist?
• Is Medical Anthropology a Good Pre-Med Major?
• Is Medical Anthropology Well Paid?
• Can Medical Anthropology Work in Hospitals?
• Is Medical Anthropology a Social Science?
• Is Medical Anthropology a Humanities?
• What Are Major Theoretical Approaches in Medical Anthropology?
• Why Does Medical Anthropology Matter?
• What Is the Main Focus of Critical Medical Anthropology?
• How Is Medical Anthropology Different From Western Medicine?
• Is Medical Anthropology a Health Career?
• What Are Careers That an Medical Anthropology Degree Would Support?
• Is There a Future for Anthropology?
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Medical Anthropology

• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 29 January 2023
• Cite this living reference work entry

• Richard Chenhall 2 ,
• Kate Senior 3 &
• Daniela Heil 4  

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This chapter explores the insights that medical anthropology contributes to studies of health, medicine, diseases, and the body. It describes how the traditional anthropological methods of participant observation, extended field work, and the study of kinship relations can reveal previously obscured patterns of disease transition. The chapter also discusses the development of rapid ethnographic assessment tools, which can be used when extended periods of fieldwork are not possible. It also considers the application of medical anthropological understanding to new global concerns from the rise of new pandemics to the complex global questions surrounding surrogacy. This chapter demonstrates the significance of the insights and language of medical anthropology into the cross-disciplinary world of health research. Medical anthropology provides for an important way in which understandings of health can be enriched, supporting a deeper level of analysis that examines the multiple levels of health in society.

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Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Richard Chenhall

School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, College of Human and Social Futures, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Kate Senior

School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Daniela Heil

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Pranee Liamputtong

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Chenhall, R., Senior, K., Heil, D. (2023). Medical Anthropology. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Social Sciences and Global Public Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96778-9_4-1

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Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology with a long history of research on environmental health-related issues, especially those pertaining to human health within environments of risk, consequences of ecological degradation, and the way patterns of development and globalization impact environmental (and therefore human) health. In this article, the authors provide an introduction to the scope of medical anthropology research, its relevance to the field of environmental health, and the methods anthropologists use in their analyses. They conclude by elaborating on some of the key conceptual frameworks that guide current research and highlight topical areas in environmental health (broadly defined) where medical anthropology research is warranted.

Introduction and Relevance

Introduction.

Medical anthropology operates as a focal area within anthropology that draws on all five of the discipline's major subfields: biological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, archeology, and applied or engaged anthropology. Medical anthropologists study health and illness as biosocial states of being in the lifeworlds of different populations, are attentive to links and flows between macro- and microenvironments, and pay close attention to the distribution (and maldistribution) of diseases and resources promoting health. They are invested in several lines of research, of which five are highlighted. The first is the biocultural examination of health and illness across the life course given changing social, cultural, material, and environmental conditions that affect biological processes. The second is the study of how cultural values and social institutions, socioeconomic processes, and power relations inform regarding the way illness and risk of illness is experienced, represented, and responded to by different groups and (ethno)medical systems. The third is an examination of health care provision and exclusion, disease surveillance, and control as a means of understanding the politics of responsibility locally, nationally, and globally. The fourth involves the critical assessment of interventions developed in the name of health and development, and the ways they have been implemented, monitored, and evaluated. And the fifth line of research is attentive to the production of knowledge about health, the way health problems are framed (and by whom), and the ways in which framing problems and groups in particular ways serve as charters for thinking about and solving problems in particular ways.

Relevance to Environmental Health

Environmental health is a central concern for medical anthropologists, who view this field broadly using several different theoretical lenses. One lens is political ecology, which focuses on political and economic factors and the way they change ecological conditions that affect relationships between humans and other species that cohabit common landscapes, environmental practices and policy, and representations of environments. In terms of scale, medical anthropologists frequently analyze biosocial phenomena on a continuum extending from the local to the global to document how social and economic relations play out in space and time. Medical anthropology's approach to environmental health begins with how human beings populate and move within and between environments, considers how their presence affects and is affected by ecosocial conditions within these environments, and considers how these conditions are shaped by local, regional, and global factors that span religion and cosmology, science and technology, economics and politics. This perspective expands the framing of environment beyond that of a discrete physical space in which humans reside, to nested and overlapping environments that synergistically affect each other in the context of rapid globalization. Today, local communities and economies are increasingly subject to pressures and opportunities associated with emerging global markets, changing patterns of consumption, and expanding networks of transportation and communication. Local environments are modified, manipulated, and affected by regional and global processes such as changing agricultural patterns and practices, industrial development and resource extraction, demographic trends associated with transitions from rural to urban economies, and the movement of goods, humans, and microorganisms. Environment is not simply where people live, but where they are positioned given local ties, individual and community identity, and emergent global ecological flows and social networks.

Methods and Framing

Medical anthropologists engage in ethnographic research, the hallmarks of which include the study of behavior, thought, and speech in context; participant observation; in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders occupying different positions of power in social formations; life histories and case studies; and historical and archival analysis. They employ many qualitative assessment tools including surveys, sorting exercises, and focus groups, as well as standardized instruments, which generate biological, biometric, psychometric, and epidemiological data as relevant to research questions at hand. They build on contributions from scholars outside anthropology, and are often involved in research partnerships with related disciplines such as public health, medical sociology, economics, geography, ecology, and the health sciences. They are also invested in involving populations in participatory research through the use of such visual and spatial technologies as participatory mapping and photo-voice.

Medical anthropologists also deem it essential to ‘study up’ and conduct systems level analysis of health care systems, health and development bureaucracies and philanthropies, non governmental organizations (NGOs), private–public partnerships, and environmental legislation that affects health outcomes. For example, medical anthropologists study the policies, politics, and bureaucracies responsible for the regulation of water and sanitation, forestry, food safety, etc., as they relate to health outcomes. They also study the activities and linkages between local and global NGOs devoted to environment and health oversight as well as the ways in which NGO hiring practices impact on government health infrastructure. Global policies related to the control of environmental pollutants ranging from pesticides to tobacco smoke, and the accessibility and regulation of pharmaceutical products, also fall under the purview of medical anthropology. In keeping with an important shift in analytical focus from ‘international health’ to ‘global health,’ medical anthropologists have become increasingly interested in health diplomacy and what it takes to introduce and enforce global policies across national boundaries for global good. Much of the driving force behind global health is the recognition that emerging diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or influenza (both swine and avian) move quickly and require well-coordinated global disease control policies that demand the surveillance of local environments and the interface between animal and human ecosystems. Medical anthropologists are involved with both documenting examples of local–global disease linkages and representations of such linkages by the popular press and political parties, as well as the response of citizens and activists.

Key Concepts

There are a number of conceptual frameworks that assist medical anthropologists in their study of environmental health, a term that is defined quite broadly to encompass health/health care–related outcomes best understood in relation to the physical, social, political, economic, and communication environments in which they occur. In the following section, a brief discussion of a few of these conceptual frameworks is provided, beginning with those provided by political ecology and biocultural anthropology. Then these concepts are expanded to consider how environmental health is linked to issues of risk and risk perception, the accumulation and persistence of meaning and memory in cultural landscapes, and the consequences of disproportionate exposure to risks and hazards. Also, implications are examined for effective governance in light of these disparities and the mobilization and response of emergent social movements as they address disparities and inequality.

Political Ecology: Natural versus Cultural Landscapes

Political ecology applies a system's perspective to understanding the ecological ramifications and sequelae of political economic inspired practices and policy on both macro- and microenvironments. It looks upstream at the actors and actions responsible for setting environmental changes in motion, and downstream at those subject to such changes. Political ecology is attentive to the impact of ecological changes on not just humans, but other species as well, which may ultimately have an effect on human health. They are also attentive to disparities that result from ecological changes such as unequal access to resources and uneven exposure to risks. There are numerous examples of political ecological studies that look at poor health as an outcome of poor environmental policy related to deforestation, the creation of dams and irrigation systems, shifts from food crops to cash crops like tobacco, misuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the explosion of consumer culture that generates vast quantities of waste, increasing fossil fuel consumption that alters climate and weather patterns, natural or man-made disasters that are exacerbated by environmental modification and degradation, and the loss of local and global biodiversity as wilderness areas are lost or degraded.

The political ecology framework also expands the definition of environment to include social processes and their impact on local ecologies, whereas at the same time recognizing that these are inherently linked assemblages of natural, cultural, political, and ideological environments that interact as a complex system. Political ecology embraces complex systems thinking and points to the limitations of adopting a narrow definition of the natural environment and treating local and global environments as independent from one another. A basic assumption is that the natural and cultural are so thoroughly intertwined that it is difficult to consider either in abstraction, and that it is necessary to consider the ecological and the sociopolitical as coextensive. Recent scholarship on the social construction of nature addresses this arbitrary distinction between nature and culture and considers the way human behavioral patterns are embedded within environmental contexts. This critical stance serves as a useful corrective against simplistic depictions of nature as bounded and an empty space within which social processes play out.

Biocultural Anthropology

Biocultural anthropology explores the nexus between culture and human biology and examines human genotypic and behavioral plasticity in context. Among other things, a biocultural approach to medical anthropology investigates short- and long-term health outcomes that result from changing and differential access to resources (e.g., stunted growth and development due to malnutrition and poor survivorship resulting from limited access to primary health care), differential exposure to environmental stressors (e.g., from exposure to pollution to exposure to the stresses of poverty, overcrowding, fear of hunger, violence, and oppression), and the cultural practices and social institutions that mediate the effect of these stressors. A biocultural approach focuses on what is cultural about biosocial relations.

Local biology and the process of embodiment are important considerations for the biocultural approach, and build on three premises: culture and biology exist in an ongoing feedback relationship, the body is a biocultural project in the making that is inextricably linked to place and time, and physical changes in the body are more than the result of gradual adaptations to the environment. Local biology is an outcome of active bodily engagement in which experiential states are at once the product of cultural and biological processes. Cultural interpretation and related bodily practices have a recursive relationship to the ongoing experience of bodily states and biological change. Local biology is studied as an expression of human plasticity – the ability of genotypic biology to change its phenotype in response to the environment – and short- and long-term consequences are discussed in terms of adaptability and adaptation.

Biocultural oriented medical anthropologists, like their ecosocial epidemiologist colleagues , view humans as embodying the cumulative effect of living in different material, social, and cultural environments throughout their life. Embodiment refers to the lived experience of one's body, as well as one's experience of life mediated through the body, as this is influenced by its physical, psychological, social, political, economic, cultural, and technologically mediated environments. Medical anthropologists investigate the cumulative effect of factors such as insufficient or excessive food, living in crowded spaces not conducive to physical activity, exposure to risks and hazards, and stressors ranging from the material to the psychosocial across the lifespan (and beyond). Common outcomes they assess include the incidence and prevalence of chronic illness, and precursors of disease like blood pressure, life expectancy, and birth weight. They are further attentive to variations in health outcomes both across and within populations, and search for differences that make a difference under such rubrics as positive deviance (see below). Opinions range on the relative contributions of biological, sociocultural, genetic, and environmental factors to states of health, but all biocultural oriented medical anthropologists agree that the ‘action is in the interaction’ – meaning that individual factors are less important than the intersection of them all.

Environments of Risk and Risk Subjectivity

Medical anthropologists study the ways in which environments are perceived to be dangerous, whether due to spirits, microbes, endemic and epidemic diseases, physical hazards, natural disasters, or violence. They look upstream to political and economic factors that foster environments of risk (see the section ‘ Political Ecology: Natural versus Cultural Landscapes ’), and attention is paid not only to the negative impacts of environmental intrusion, modification, and degradation of local ecosystems, but to the integrity of local cosmologies in cultural contexts where maintaining cosmological relations is central to a sense of well-being. Medical anthropology is attentive to the ways in which perceptions of risk alter behavior, shape government policy, enable governance, frame health care interventions, and influence consumer behavior as well as marketing. Research focuses on issues that include surveillance and regulation of populations at risk, social and technological strategies to reduce risks, perceptions and experiences of risk exposure (risk subjectivity) that lead to the adoption of risk-related practices, and social responses to perceptions of being at risk.

Medical anthropologists also study risk as a prominent theme found in popular health culture, including ideas about how to mitigate risks to personal health when living in an environment of risk as a means of harm reduction. Prominent social philosophers Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have noted that people live in a global risk society, exposed to increasing risks as well as information about risk, produced by different stakeholders. These stakeholders range from medical and public health professionals working with diagnostic tests to identify risk to marketers cashing in on collective anxieties. The preoccupation with risk in popular literature is symptomatic of one of the paradoxes of modernity. Citizens of the risk society strive to gain mastery over nature through technology, yet increasingly recognize that tangible risks occur as local and global environments are modified by this very technology. These emergent risks are then addressed with more technology in a never-ending feedback loop.

People also live in a time of increasing distrust in information about risk, given competing accounts of risk factors and increasing reports of information bias and downright fraud. Citizens of the risk society are subjected to increased exposure to information about risk in media environments, even though these risks are often uncertain, their impacts unknown, and future consequences unknowable. Medical anthropologists are becoming more interested in studying risk information environments and what sources of information about risk and which spokespeople are trustworthy. They are also becoming more attentive to the ways in which information about risk can actually place populations at greater risk depending on how segments of the population respond to this information – be it hypervigilance, disinterest, or fatalism.

Finally, medical anthropologists have pushed for greater recognition of environments of risk as a counterbalance to public health's preoccupation with risk factors, groups at risk, and the study of risky behavior. These foci of investigation unintentionally lead to victim blaming when the local environment context is not taken into account. Particular environments predispose types of risky behavior and contribute to the maldistribution of ill health and groups at greater risk.

Space and Place, Memory, and Experience

The concept of place as physical space predisposed to particular types of human interaction contributes to the anthropological investigation of environments of risk. The distinction between space and place originated within the field of human geography. Human cultural landscapes are seen as places embedded with meaning, histories, and memories that set the stage for particular types of interactions, be they associated with risky behavior or behavior conducive to the collective good. Perceptions of place are also tied to social norms, and public health advocates compete with industries such as Big Tobacco over who gets to define normative behavior in places where people gather, live, or work. These place-based meanings have a half-life and fade or persist depending on how their remembrance is framed or reproduced.

Structural Violence and Social Capital

Analyses of structural violence draw attention to health and economic inequality as outcomes of social structures, institutions, and policies that systematically block members of a population from meeting basic needs, resulting in ill health and premature death. Structural violence devalues and marginalizes people, although policies that promote it are often dressed up as serving national and global interests. For example, World Bank structural adjustment policies have been criticized for negatively impacting on the livelihood of the poor as well as reducing their access to health care in developing countries. Other examples include policies in the United States that restrict access to health programs or benefits, or lead to the closing of unprofitable clinics in impoverished neighborhoods.

Structural violence creates environments of health and health care risk. Drawing on biocultural and critical public health reasoning (ecosocial epidemiology, etc.), medical anthropologists study both the short- and long-term impacts of structural violence, as cumulative effects of unhealthy environments may take years to manifest in higher rates of chronic disease among marginalized populations. The consequences of chronic disease are presently under-appreciated in contexts where acute illness is so visible, but in reality, the two are often interrelated. For example, fighting malnutrition is at once a child survival priority to prevent stunting and wasting during a child's peak period of development, and a way of reducing chronic disease later in life for children who do survive and are more likely to suffer from diseases like diabetes or heart disease.

Medical anthropologists also study the effect of structural violence on the integrity of social relations and how this affects social support and mutual assistance within communities and between extended kin during times of illness and disaster. Social capital has been used as a gloss to describe social support, social reciprocity, and positive features of social organization that facilitate collective action and cooperation. One of the most dangerous effects of structural violence is degradation of social networks and loss of social capital, which results in loss of family or community security and safety nets. When extreme poverty and uncertainty make reciprocity impossible, the very fabric of social relations comes undone. Medical anthropologists study individual and environmental effects of these states of anomie, and the social institutions to which people turn as sources of resilience and social revitalization.

A disease syndemic framework is used to study concurrent and synergistic health problems linked to common antecedent and contributing factors in environments of risk. Attention is drawn to both causal factors and reciprocal relationships that lead to correlations between patterns of disease incidence and social or economic variables, although recently, more emphasis has been placed on environmental variables as well (see below). An analysis focused on syndemics invites to look upstream and consider the importance of how these variables translate into elevated disease concentrations, and to consider not only the current impact of interactions between social factors and health problems, but future problems that result from such interactions. Some examples of syndemics that are of interest to medical anthropologists include the interrelated problems of drug abuse, violence, tuberculosis (TB) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in North American inner cities; or the increasing proportion of overweight residents of the United States, and the linked diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.

These examples focus on the built/urban environment and the conditions that result from the interaction between disease assemblages and social factors that shape their impact and distribution. More recently, attention has been focused on human–animal interactions, especially as zoonotic diseases such as SARS or influenza (both avian and swine) encourage a consideration of the transmission of microbes/viruses back and forth between humans and animals, and the environmental factors such as deforestation, environmental degradation, or habitat fragmentation that may increase the potential for zoonotic jumps. A syndemic framework applied to zoonoses and human–animal interactions points in a more complex direction, encouraging a consideration of not only the consequences of habitat encroachment or environmental degradation in specific cases or regions, but the large-scale practices such as industrial farming, monoculture agriculture, or deforestation as part of a larger global problem, since individual practices or events cannot be isolated from the larger impacts of the human footprint on both local and global environments. The ‘one-health’ approach to human–animal interactions, and global environmental health more broadly, emphasizes the synergistic relationships that the syndemic framework suggests, integrating them at multiple scales, from the global to the local, and in multiple nested contexts, including socioeconomic, political, and environmental.

Network Society and Biosociality

Today, the most distant points of the earth are connected by flows of information enabled by communications technology and levels of connectivity that were previously unimaginable. This has radically altered the notion of personal, social, and political networks, as well as that of ‘the local,’ which can no longer be viewed in isolation. The local is now part of an interconnected global network that exchanges information, commodities, images, and ideas, and is facilitated by technologies such as the Internet, cell phones, text messaging, and emerging social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook. The extent and speed of this exchange means that the plight of a community or the goals of a local environmental group can be communicated almost as fast (or faster!) across the globe as it can to the next town, and new social groupings of individuals coalesce around shared environmental experiences and mutual advocacy interests. Paul Rabinow coined the term biosociality to refer to groups that come to share a common biologically understood identity due to illness, health-related condition, or perceived risk. In some instances, shared biological affiliation has led members of a community of affliction to make demands on institutions, governments, and scientists as a form of biopolitics. Medical anthropologists are interested in how such groups (ranging from NGOs to patient advocate and environmental health groups) are formed and mobilized as new actors on the global health stage, how their activism is responded to by those in power, and the novel sorts of social organization that result from these novel groupings centered on biosociality.

Mediated Environments and Epidemic Fear

In the global network society, the range and extent of media environments has expanded tremendously, as local media is picked up nationally and internationally, and global health surveillance searches local news stories on the Internet for information about emerging diseases and to filter out rumors from credible leads. Likewise, international news is being reported locally, along with commentary on global health threats that are colored by political rhetoric and subject to sensationalism or attempts to allay public fears. Media environments also include advertising copy and marketing campaigns, which are often difficult to distinguish from legitimate science in the health–medical field, so that much of the public's information about health and illness is gleaned from information and advertising generated by the pharmaceutical industry, an industry that also influences publications in scientific journals cited in support of their products. Mediated environments at once facilitate the transfer of credible information and foster epidemic fear, which raises concerns over responsible reporting and oversight as well as the need to study how the public understands and responds to news stories and advertisements that inform the public about risk. Analysis of media environments does not assume comprehensive availability of information, but focuses on the myriad forces that affect what information is made available or chosen for dissemination, the global network of media conduits that convey this information, the multiple social contexts that receive this information via official (e.g., politics, news media) and unofficial (e.g., rumor) networks, and the impact these flows of information have on risk perception, epidemic fear, and behavior change.

The spread of information about the impending threat of disease can even outpace the spread of the actual disease (e.g., SARS, avian flu), leading the public to either overreact or lose trust in public health warnings, or it can lag behind and fail to report information about diseases that should or would raise concerns in the general population (e.g., TB, HIV/AIDS). Medical anthropologists are interested in translational research that studies how health information is presented to the public, received, and understood, as well as in monitoring the impact of news stories and advertising campaigns on different sectors of the population. They are equally interested in an ‘epidemiology of ideas’ that considers what information and representations are contagious and are amenable to spread, as in the study of the contagious pathogens themselves. Examples such as SARS, avian flu, and most recently the H1N1 swine flu pandemic raise questions about not only the environmental and political ecological contexts that help or hinder the spread of potentially pandemic diseases, but also the speed at which information about these risks can flow and the effect of this information when it reaches populations before actual exposure. They also raise questions related to state control over this information in efforts to control representations of the disease risk itself, and shape international perceptions of effectiveness of treatment and prevention plans, which are tied up within the biopolitical agendas of modernity and national sovereignty.

From Risk Perception to Popular Epidemiology

Ulrich Beck famously declared that ‘smog is democratic,’ in a discussion of the universal risks that modern people face as part of the changing nature of industrial and technocratic society. The reality is that exposure to pollution, whether industrial, agricultural, or environmental, is anything but egalitarian. His intent, of course, was to emphasize the global nature of the risk society in which people live, and that threats to humans are a global, rather than regional or local, phenomena. He noted that marginalized groups, neighborhoods, or regions often lack the social or political capital to block polluters of what are described in the following text as the commons. The end result is a clustering rather than even distribution of pollution and environmental degradation.

Social movements arise to fight against both global and local sources of pollution, environmental destruction, and degradation. Popular epidemiology describes an example of an emergent social movement within the United States wherein members of local communities who are dissatisfied with governmental policies and oversight are undertaking their own analyses of local problems related to poor health outcomes. They are using tools increasingly at their disposal to communicate with scientists, environmental activists, policy makers in other places, and so on, and taking well-informed proactive stances against politics and business as usual. Medical anthropologists study popular forms of social empowerment and local responses to environmental and occupational health crises. They are also interested in how local groups that share a common sense of biosociality find and support one another on the Internet as well as communicate their plight to larger audiences and inspire other groups to mobilize.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Anthropologists working on environmental health draw on a robust literature that has grown up alongside a discussion of the tragedy of the commons. The idea of global commons has been used to describe various shared resources that are both managed through community oversight and are undermined by greed, poor regulation, and poor enforcement of existing regulations. The management of resources like clean air, water, a stable local food supply, and so on, and practices such as sustainable agriculture and water conservation demonstrate ways that groups come together to preserve/conserve resources. Examples of mismanagement, overuse of limited resources, and the cumulative effects of seemingly small negative impacts illustrate the tragedy of these commons, as resources are squandered, degraded, or polluted. At a local scale, people develop a relationship with land and the surrounding environment, and the knowledge, ideas, and informational resources embedded within the local cultural and physical landscapes are lost when these landscapes are destroyed or altered by habitat loss, environmental degradation, or pollution. Globally, issues such as loss of biodiversity; cumulative impacts of pollution; the overuse of pesticides, antibiotics, and fertilizers; and widespread environmental modification and degradation all point to potential global impacts. Global versus local governance of the commons is a contentious political issue especially as it pertains to issues of national sovereignty and the locus of responsibility, for example, in governing the availability and use of valuable antibiotics like the drug rifampicin (an important TB drug) or antiretroviral drugs for HIV. If they are misused or sold in diluted doses, resistant pathogens will emerge that affect all nations. Medical anthropologists interested in health diplomacy investigate when and under what circumstances a sovereign state allows global bodies to dictate policy within its border or engage in global surveillance.

Future Directions for Medical Anthropology

The following section highlights a few of the research directions presently being pursued by medical anthropologists engaging environmental health as a broad field of inquiry. The following section begins with a note on the development of innovative methods.

Medical anthropologists are experimenting with a number of novel methodologies made possible by the availability of new technologies. One such method is participatory geographic information systems (GIS) mapping. When used in conjunction with ethnographic research methods, such mapping permits a better understanding of local perceptions of the distribution of health problems. Local populations are shown maps depicting higher and lower prevalence rates of a focal problem or syndemic, and then asked to participate in problem solving about what factors contribute to the patterns visually shown. The method then layers maps with existing information on who inhabits different places and what is known about the space and the people who inhabit these places. Mapping makes transparent what information health officials are collecting and seeing as risk factors, and allows local populations to interrogate these data and the way it is collected. They are also given the opportunity to identify relevant data they think is not being collected. This is an empowering methodology that does more than simply validate or cross-check epidemiological patterns and distributions of environmental problems. It facilitates community discussion of these patterns, their meaning, and possible solutions.

Photo voice is another promising methodology that can be used alone or in conjunction with participatory mapping. It consists of giving community members the technology to create visual representations of their own locale, patterns of social interaction, and physical activity in different spaces at different times. They are also asked to record such things as what spaces are deemed safe or dangerous at different times as related to seasonality or the risk of disasters such as storm surges and flooding. Other things that may be captured by photo voice include seasonal challenges that impact on health and health care seeking, such as water availability and transportation. Like maps, these visual representations of local places foster community dialogue and a grounding of discussion in the lifeworld of participants.

Representations

In addition to studying the physical environment and its occupants, medical anthropologists have been focusing on the representations of environments by stakeholders who have differing agendas when representing spaces and the people who inhabit them. By broadening analytical focus beyond physical and material landscapes to include ideological, representational, and perceptual landscapes, medical anthropologists have been attempting to capture the dynamic interplay between (1) political representations of environments of risk; (2) media representations as influenced by local, national, and international information streams; (3) public health representations; and (4) community- and NGO-based representations. The issue is how various representations of the environment and environmental health problems are associated with the politics of responsibility, and how these politics play out in health policy. For example, much research on emerging and reemerging infectious disease centers on the epidemiology of these diseases, and environmental and behavioral factors that are thought to catalyze their emergence or facilitate their spread. Medical anthropologists are contributing to this field of study by assisting public health teams in their efforts to identify routes of disease transmission as well as routes of information flow about diseases that affect community responses to them. This includes the monitoring of rumors associated with epidemic fear, whether expressions of current collective anxieties are tied to social memory of past epidemic disease or politically motivated and strategically disseminated.

The Consumer Environment

There is a great need for medical anthropologists to study ways in which patterns of consumption affect human biology, ecology, and the epidemiology of emerging and reemerging diseases. Patterns of consumption create environments of risk through pollution (air, water, garbage disposal), increases in traffic fatalities (road congestion, alcohol consumption, cell phone use while driving), new breeding sites for disease vectors (tires, plastic containers), and breeding grounds for violence (availability of firearms, illegal drugs, etc.). On a structural level, poor planning of urban environments encourages unhealthy consumption habits. For example, lack of safe walkable communities contributes to car-centric transportation and decreases in physical activity. The decreased presence of fresh food vendors due to high rents or lack of space for markets leads to greater consumption of fast foods. The proliferation of advertising of fast food, liquor, and cigarettes in spaces inhabited by the poor predisposes them to lifestyle illnesses.

Living in environments of risk and engaging in unhealthy consumption habits also drives a second type of consumption behavior associated with harm reduction. Harm reduction behavior is diverse, ranging from the consumption of dietary supplements to detoxify the body, to air filters to clean the air, bottled water, and ways of coping with stress that include everything from yoga classes to the taking of drugs like Prozac. Medical anthropologists are presently studying both how individuals exposed to environments of risk attempt to protect themselves, and how an emphasis on self-care averts attention from the consequences of unhealthy living spaces and hazardous work environments. To what extent does this reduce pressure to alter these unhealthy environments? Taking a life span perspective, medical anthropologists are also interested in studying the biological sequelae of shifts in a population's consumption of food and food drugs, and new living and working arrangements. To what extent does this change the age of puberty, increase the incidence of obesity, or predispose populations to chronic diseases like diabetes?

Global Citizenship, the Politics of Responsibility, and Health Diplomacy

The ways in which global health problems and the specter of a disease pandemic are framed raise sensitive political issues regarding the politics of responsibility and national sovereignty. Many environmental problems are global in nature, but some countries exacerbate them more than others through activities that promote global warming, pesticide overuse, deforestation, or loss of biodiversity. Medical anthropologists are beginning to take a greater interest in monitoring and examining arguments about global policies that relate to transnational regulation. These arguments are being advanced by various stakeholders, which range from governments to NGOs, and local to transnational business interests. They consider issues such as the following. What types of arguments are being made in the name of health diplomacy? What is the relative success or failure of these arguments? What types of data do stakeholders find compelling? And what sets of issues, stakeholders, and social processes are involved in successful and unsuccessful attempts at diplomacy and governance? Medical anthropologists are studying global efforts aimed at the surveillance and control of emerging diseases and antimicrobial resistance, and the control and regulation of industries peddling ill health, such as Big Tobacco.

Response to emerging diseases has been described as the ‘new ping pong’ of international relations. Countries that rarely agree are now willing to cooperate when it comes to the surveillance and control of diseases like avian flu and SARS. The acceptance of global regulations that eclipse national sovereignty has been described as one of the most radical and far-reaching changes in international law on public health since the beginning of international health cooperation in the mid-nineteenth century. Medical anthropologists are interested in studying how this policy plays out in countries that are presently undergoing decentralization. How will global funds for surveillance and control be distributed locally, and how will oversight of disease control programs be managed? Medical anthropologists have begun to critically assess the local impact of transnational techniques of governance associated with agenda setting policies and programs, audit, and evaluation. They have called for ethnographies of the technologies of governance as a much-needed part of anthropology of emerging health policy in a global health environment.

Social Movements, NGOs, and Global Environmental Health

The emergence of social movements and NGOs in response to both acute environmental health crises and chronic environmental health problems is of considerable interest to medical anthropologists. NGOs at once place pressure on governments to do something and take pressure off national governments by executing small-scale local responses to problems that the state is either unwilling or incapable of addressing via national policy. Medical anthropologists have become interested in studying the ways in which local social organizations are supported by, and interface with, transnational movements, and how national governments and international organizations enlist the assistance of these advocacy groups to further differing agendas. They are further interested in how non-state actors (i.e., foundations, NGOs, advocacy, and professional groups) at once advance a global health agenda and present a problem for the coordination and oversight of health activities in a rapidly changing health care environment.

The Study of Protective Factors and Resilience

In the field of epidemiology far more attention is given to the study of risk factors than protective factors and resilience. Medical anthropologists have long been interested in social institutions and forms of behavior that reduce the chances and impact of illness and other forms of misfortune, and enable recuperation. For example, they have studied the impact of disaster or violence on communities and examined social institutions that facilitate recovery. But more attention needs to be dedicated to this endeavor. It will be important to study the resources communities draw on following periodic and relatively rare crises, as well as recurrent or endemic events that chronically persist. Medical anthropologists have become interested in studying not just groups at risk, but positive deviance groups or individuals that fare better than expected in a difficult situation or harsh environment. It is hoped that the study of positive deviance will provide insights into the resilience of households and social networks, and suggest ways that these social formations may be buffered and strengthened.

Medical Geology.

Abbreviations

Further reading.

• Briggs C., Nichter M. Biocommunicability and the Biopolitics of Pandemic Threats. Medical Anthropology. 2009; 28 (3):189–198. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
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• Krieger N., editor. Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives. Baywood Publishing Company; Amityville: 2005. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lin N., Cook K.S., Burt R.S., editors. Social Capital: Theory and Research. Transaction Publishers; New Brunswick: 2001. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lupton D. Routledge; New York: 1999. Risk: Key Ideas. [ Google Scholar ]
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• Petryna A. Princeton University Press; Princeton: 2004. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. [ Google Scholar ]
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Relevant Websites

• http://www.cdc.gov/syndemics/ Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Syndemics Prevention Network.
• http://www.medanthro.net/research/cagh/index.html Critical Anthropology for Global Health (CAGH) study group.
• http://www.medanthro.net Society for Medical Anthropology.

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Van Hollen, C. C. Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India (University of California Press, 2022).

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ANTH 331: Advanced Topics in Medical Anthropology (BMC)

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• Ph.D., Sociocultural Anthropology, the University of Texas at Austin
• M.A., Social Sciences, University of Chicago
• B.A., Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton College

Medical anthropology is a field of anthropology focused on the relationship between health, illness, and culture. Beliefs and practices about health vary across different cultures and are influenced by social, religious, political, historical, and economic factors. Medical anthropologists use anthropological theories and methods to generate unique insights into how different cultural groups around the world experience, interpret, and respond to questions of health, illness, and wellness.

Medical anthropologists study a wide array of topics. Specific questions include:

• How does a particular culture define health or illness?
• How might a diagnosis or condition be interpreted by different cultures?
• What are the roles of doctors, shamans, or alternative health practitioners?
• Why do certain groups experience better or worse health outcomes, or higher prevalence of certain diseases?
• What is the connect between health, happiness, and stress?
• How are different conditions stigmatized or even celebrated in specific cultural contexts?

In addition, medical anthropologists study the factors that affect or are affected by the distribution of illness, and are also closely attuned to questions of inequality, power, and health.

History of the Field

Medical anthropology emerged as a formal area of study in the mid-20th century. Its roots are in cultural anthropology, and it extends that subfield’s focus on social and cultural worlds to topics relating specifically to health, illness, and wellness. Like cultural anthropologists, medical anthropologists typically use ethnography – or ethnographic methods – to conduct research and gather data. Ethnography is a qualitative research method that involves full immersion in the community being studied. The ethnographer (i.e., the anthropologist) lives, works, and observes daily life in this distinctive cultural space, which is called the field site.

Medical anthropology grew increasingly important after World War II, when anthropologists began to formalize the process of applying ethnographic methods and theories to questions of health around the world. This was a time of widespread international development and humanitarian efforts aimed at bringing modern technologies and resources to countries in the global South. Anthropologists proved particularly useful for health-based initiatives, using their unique skills of cultural analysis to help develop programs tailored to local practices and belief systems. Specific campaigns focused on sanitation, infectious disease control, and nutrition.

Key Concepts and Methods

Medical anthropology’s approach to ethnography has changed since the field’s early days, thanks in large part to the growth of globalization and the emergence of new communication technologies. While the popular image of anthropologists involves living in remote villages in far-off lands, contemporary anthropologists conduct research in a variety of field sites ranging from urban centers to rural hamlets, and even in social media communities. Some also incorporate quantitative data into their ethnographic work.

Some anthropologists now design multi-sited studies, for which they conduct ethnographic fieldwork in different field sites. These might include comparative studies of health care in rural versus urban spaces in the same country, or combine traditional in-person fieldwork living in a particular place with digital research of social media communities. Some anthropologists even work in multiple countries around the world for a single project. Together, these new possibilities for fieldwork and field sites have broadened the scope of anthropological research, enabling scholars to better study life in a globalized world.

Medical anthropologists use their evolving methodologies to examine key concepts, including:

• Health disparities : the differences in the distribution of health outcomes or disease prevalence across groups
• Global health : the study of health across the globe
• Ethnomedicine : the comparative study of traditional medicine practices in different cultures
• Cultural relativism : the theory that all cultures must be considered on their own terms, not as superior or inferior to others.

What Do Medical Anthropologists Study? 

Medical anthropologists work to solve a variety of problems. For instance, some researchers focus on health equity and health disparities, trying to explain why certain communities have better or worse health outcomes than others. Others might ask how a particular health condition, such as Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia, is experienced in localized contexts around the globe.

Medical anthropologists can be divided into two general groups: academic and applied . Academic medical anthropologists work within university systems, specializing in research, writing, and/or teaching. In contrast, applied medical anthropologists often work outside of university settings. They can be found in hospitals, medical schools, public health programs, and in nonprofit or international non-governmental organizations. While academic anthropologists often have more open-ended research agendas, applied practitioners are typically part of a team trying to solve or generate insights into a specific problem or question.

Today, key research areas include medical technologies, genetics and genomics, bioethics, disability studies, health tourism, gender-based violence, infectious disease outbreaks, substance abuse, and more.

Ethical Considerations

Both academic and applied anthropologists face similar ethical considerations, which are typically overseen by their universities, funders, or other governing organizations. Institutional review boards were established in the U.S. in the 1970s to ensure ethical compliance for research involving human subjects, which includes most ethnographic projects. Key ethical considerations for medical anthropologists are:

• Informed consent : ensuring that research subjects are aware of any risks and consent to participate in the study.
• Privacy : protecting participants' health status, image or likeness, and private information 
• Confidentiality : protecting the anonymity (if desired) of a research subject, often by using pseudonymous names for participants and field site locations

Medical Anthropology Today

The most well-known anthropologist today is Paul Farmer. A physician and an anthropologist, Dr. Farmer teaches at Harvard University and has received widespread acclaim for his work in global health. Other key figures in medical anthropology include Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Byron Good, and Rayna Rapp.

The Society for Medical Anthropology is the primary professional organization for medical anthropologists in North America, and is affiliated with the American Anthropological Association. There are scholarly journals devoted solely to medical anthropology, such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Medical Anthropology, and the online journal  Medicine Anthropology Theory .  Somatosphere.net  is a popular blog focusing on medical anthropology and related disciplines.  

Medical Anthropology Key Takeaways

• Medical anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the relationship between health, illness, and culture.
• Medical anthropologists can be divided into two key fields: applied and academic.
• While medical anthropologists study a wide range of issues and topics, key concepts include health disparities, global health, medical technologies, and bioethics.
• “American Anthropological Association Statement on Ethnography and Institutional Review Boards.” American Anthropological Association , 2004.
• Crossman, Ashley. “What is Ethnography? What It Is and How To Do It.” ThoughtCo, 2017.
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Medical Anthropology by Michele Rivkin-Fish LAST REVIEWED: 25 November 2014 LAST MODIFIED: 25 November 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0099

Medical anthropology examines health and illness, disease categories and treatments, the body, biotechnologies, and health-care systems as socially produced phenomena. As is true for anthropology generally, medical anthropology takes a holistic approach to research, examining cultural, historical, political-economic, and ecological dimensions of health and illness. There are a number of noteworthy intellectual trajectories. Biocultural anthropology examines the ways environmental conditions shape disease processes, highlighting the impacts of social, ecological, and evolutionary forces on human biology. Cultural medical anthropology is the largest subfield, with several lines of study. Ethnomedicine examines indigenous and non-biomedical healing systems in their broader cultural context, including etiological understandings, the social organization of healing relations and therapy management, nosology, and the effectiveness of healing approaches. Medical pluralism explores the ways persons and community groups navigate between competing healing approaches. Symbolic anthropology has been central to studies of ethnomedicine and medical pluralism, although scholars have also emphasized pragmatism and evolution. Mental health/illness is an arena where ethnomedicine has been particularly productive in highlighting the cultural diversity of illness knowledge and care for those considered ill. More generally, the ethnographic description of illness experience has long been central to medical anthropology, giving rise to numerous theoretical questions regarding the ways illnesses gain legitimacy or become stigmatized; the narratives of self, other, and illness that come to shape identity and social relations; and institutional, interpersonal, and expert forms of care. Race, gender, and other forms of difference in relation to illness, healing, and health system reform are of great interest to medical anthropology. A concern with inequalities characterizes all of the subfields, but it is the hallmark of one of the most vibrant theoretical frameworks in the field—critical medical anthropology, which emphasizes the global, political-economic, and historical contextualization of illness. Since the late 1990s, an important synthesis has developed between critical medical anthropology and biocultural anthropology, in which evolutionary and ecological components of disease are considered in light of political and economic inequalities. An abiding concern of medical anthropologists is the need to establish the field’s salience for wider interdisciplinary endeavors in medicine and public health. The question of how to demonstrate the field’s broader social relevance while maintaining the critical perspective on biomedicine and global health enabled by anthropology’s cross-cultural and political-economic frameworks has been a long-standing issue, both controversial and productive. It emerges in topics such as cultural competence and applied medical anthropology, genomics, global health, and health-care reform.

A range of textbooks have been published in medical anthropology, reflecting the diverse perspectives of the field while simultaneously striving for a degree of holism. Ember and Ember 2004 is a vast reference with stand-alone articles introducing key topics, terms, and conceptual frameworks as well as ethnographic case studies. Priced beyond the norm for textbooks, this reference would be best used selectively by advanced students interested in learning about a particular area of the field. Janzen 2002 is an erudite text that offers rich introductory explanations with attention to historical complexity. Joralemon 2006 , one of the most popular introductory textbooks, is highly readable, with compelling case studies to illustrate theoretical concepts. McElroy and Townsend 2009 is a highly popular biocultural textbook now in its fifth edition. Wiley and Allen 2013 is another biocultural textbook that provides somewhat more discussion of paleopathology than McElroy and Townsend 2009 . Singer and Baer 2012 is a well-written introduction to critical medical anthropology that highlights medical anthropology’s significance for a range of public health endeavors. Nichter 2008 also emphasizes the relevance of medical anthropology; his text is aimed at a more advanced readership of global health professionals. Winkelman 2008 is a textbook in applied anthropology suitable for all levels.

Ember, Carol R., and Melvin Ember. 2004. Encyclopedia of medical anthropology: Health and illness in the world’s cultures . New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

DOI: 10.1007/0-387-29905-X

This massive reference provides essays on key concepts and areas of scholarship in all fields of medical anthropology. Organized into two volumes, the first examines general concepts; medical systems; political, economic, and social issues; sexuality, reproduction, and the life cycle; and health conditions; the second includes fifty-two ethnographic case studies.

Janzen, John M. 2002. The social fabric of health: An introduction to medical anthropology . Boston: McGraw Hill.

Intellectually rigorous and clearly written, this textbook brings together a rich array of ethnographic and historical case studies. Focus is on cultural approaches, with some attention to biocultural issues. Diverse historical and intellectual trajectories within medical anthropology are also addressed. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

Joralemon, Donald. 2006. Exploring medical anthropology . 2d ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

Clearly written, engaging introductory-level text that describes the multiple methods and approaches that comprise medical anthropology. Chapters include attention to research questions, methods, and analysis; case studies explore different approaches within the discipline to key issues such as epidemics. Substantial focus on biomedicine, applied medical anthropology, and medical ethics.

McElroy, Ann, and Patricia K. Townsend. 2009. Medical anthropology in ecological perspective . 5th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Focusing on biocultural perspectives on disease, this classic textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students covers research in human biology, paleopathology, cultural anthropology, and applied medical anthropology. The fifth edition adds new sections written by leading specialists as guest contributors. Includes discussion of careers in health, environment, and applied medical anthropology.

Nichter, Mark. 2008. Global health: Why cultural perceptions, social representations, and biopolitics matter . Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.

Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, including health professionals; would also be valuable for graduate-level students in anthropology, development, and global health. Through case studies and theoretically informed analysis, this text explains how the core insights from cultural medical anthropology are essential for conducting successful global health interventions.

Singer, Merrill, and Hans Baer. 2012. Introducing medical anthropology: A discipline in action . 2d ed. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Suitable for beginning undergraduates. Authored by the leading scholars of critical medical anthropology, this text emphasizes the relevance of medical anthropological knowledge for undertaking global health and related work. Addresses traditional issues such as ethnomedicine and includes innovative chapters on what medical anthropologists do and topics such as climate change.

Wiley, Andrea S., and John S. Allen, eds. 2013. Medical anthropology: A biocultural approach . 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

This textbook, while emphasizing biocultural approaches, includes discussions of cultural dimensions of healing including ethnomedicine. Many chapters include brief profiles of leading “Anthropologist[s] in Action” and conclude with lists of suggested ethnographies that complement the theoretical issues discussed.

Winkelman, Michael. 2008. Culture and health: Applying medical anthropology . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

This introductory textbook is aimed at students of anthropology and the health sciences as well as health-care practitioners. Provides a good overview of all theoretical and methodological approaches in medical anthropology, including psychobiology of healing. Extensive attention on applied work in cultural competence, transcultural psychiatry, and ethnopsychology.

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Anthropology Research Topics And Writing Ideas For Students

Writing an anthropology research paper is in a lot of ways similar to writing an argumentative essay in other disciplines. Usually, the significant difference between these essays is how you support your idea. While you may use only literature to prove your point in an argumentative essay, you may need to employ textual proofs from artifacts, ethnographies, etc., in an anthropology essay.

Research in anthropology could be thrilling, particularly if you have many anthropology project ideas. Anthropology studies the evolution of human culture and therefore provides a wide range of anthropology essay topics that spill into history, biology, sociology, etc. Many anthropological research projects borrow from other social sciences. It is easy to feel that overwhelming grip on your chest if you’re unable to choose an anthropology research topic.

How to Write an Anthropology Research Paper

Guide how to write an anthropology research paper, the excellent list of 110 anthropology research paper topics, physical anthropology research paper topics, medical anthropology research paper topics, cultural anthropology research paper ideas, best cultural anthropology essay topics, biological anthropology research paper topics.

• Forensic Anthropology Research Paper Topics

Are you worried because you don’t know how to write an anthropology paper? Writing an anthropology paper could be so much fun if you can nail the basics. It is not as bad as people paint it to be, especially if you get writing help from our professional writers . With the right anthropology paper format, anthropology research topics, and anthropology research paper examples, you’re set to go!

If you’re a big fan of doing lots of things in a short time and with fewer efforts, then you’re in the right place. This guide is full of the tips and skills you need to arrange your ideas properly. It also contains anthropology paper examples, anthropology paper topics, and other life-saving tips you may need. Ready to know how to start an anthropology research paper? Let’s delve right in!

How do you get started on an anthropology research paper? Below is the most comprehensive list on the internet to get you home and dry in record time!

• Review the Assignment Guidelines
• Develop a Topic
• Outline your Paper
• Do some Library Research
• Write a Rough Draft
• Write the Paper
• Edit the Paper

We shall shortly expound on this list to help you better understand them.

• Review the Assignment Guidelines: your professor may give you some guidelines to follow. To avoid deviating from the instructor’s expectations, spend some time reviewing your assignment guidelines so that you know the exact things you need to accomplish. For example, confirm if there are any stated anthropology research methods and the likes. It is beneficial to have a writing schedule. If you have a lot of time in your hands before the submission time, spreading out the workload will help to ease some of the stress. If you’re naturally a binge writer, sit at your computer early and bleed!
• Develop a Topic:  search for some anthropology research paper ideas and choose from the vast array of anthropology research topics available. Select a topic that revolves around a guiding question. This topic should connect on a deeper level to the theme of the course. The length requirement for the paper will help you know if your topic is too big, too small, or just good enough. For a short paper, you may want to focus on a particular culture or event in the context of a broader topic. Ensure that your thesis focuses on anthropology and that it draws from anthropological theories or ideas. Now, do a quick search to confirm if there are scholarly materials available for this topic. It is easier to write a paper with some available references.
• Introduction/Abstract
• Library Research: now, start the research on your topic, preferably from course materials. A bibliography at the end of a relevant course reading is also a great way to get other related materials. Depending on the requirement of the assignment, feel free to search for other books or articles.
• Write a Rough Draft: during your research, endeavor to make proper jottings and references, which will form the rough draft of your essay. A rough draft will help you create dots that you will be able to connect later on.
• Title: Usually on a separate page and contains the abstract.
• Introduction/Abstract : A short paragraph showing the road map of your thesis.
• Body: Leverages your thesis and presenting your research in a detailed and logical structure.
• Conclusion: The conclusion is a short paragraph that summarizes your fundamental theme and substantiates your thesis.
• References: A citation of the resources you used in your paper. Follow the referencing style which your instructor chooses.
• Edit the Paper:  you may engage any of your friends to help you go through your essay. Make some final checks such as the length requirement, the format and citation style, spelling and grammatical errors, logical flow of ideas and clarity, substantial support of the claim, etc. Once you edit your paper, turn it in and accept an A+!

Without further ado, here are 110 anthropology research paper topics for free! With 18 topics each from the six main subcategories of anthropology, you can’t get it wrong!

• Eugenics — its merits and demerits in the 21st-century world.
• Human Origin: Comparing the creationist versus evolutionist views on the origin of man.
• Ancient Egypt: The preservation of their dead and underlying beliefs.
• Homo habilis: Investigating Contemporary facts supporting their past existence.
• Drowning: Clarifying the cause of drowning by examining the physical and anatomical evidence.
• Smoking and its effects on the physical appearance of humans over decades of indulgence.
• Physical labor: Exploring its long-term impact on the physical appearance of humans.
• The relationship of Kyphosis with human senescence.
• Aging in Western Culture.
• Skin color: Exploring the influence of the environment on human skin color across continents.
• Species and language: Focus on ways species evolve across the world and ways language acquisition affects and influences culture.
• Abiogenesis: Research about abiogenesis and how it affects human development
• Animal stability: How captive animals are different from those that live in the wild.
• Henry Walter: The ways Henry Walter contributed to the field of physical anthropology.
• Cephalization: The process of cephalization and what it entails.
• Genotype: The environment correlation study.
• Genetics: What does genetic hijacking mean?
• Altruism: Do people learn altruism or it is an acquired state.
• Applying the Concepts of Ethnozoology in medicine.
• Critically Assessing the fundamental posits of critical medical anthropology (CMA).
• The 2014 Ebola virus outbreak in Africa: Evaluating the success of control interventions.
• Exploring the applications of Ethnobotany in medicine.
• Nuclear disaster: A research into the life of survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.
• HIV/AIDS: The reasons for prevalent societal infamy and the way forward.
• HIV/AIDS epidemic in Europe: Exploring the roles of commercial sex workers in the spread of the disease.
• Alternative medicine in China: A comparative review of its weaknesses and possible strengths in the light of Orthodox medicine.
• HIV/AIDS in Africa: A critical assessment of extensively troubled nations and populations.
• Depression in South-East Asia: Sheer social noise or severe threat?
• Adult’s onset diabetes: Research on how diabetes is a major health issue in aboriginal populations in The U.S and Canada.
• ARV rollout: The role of the ARV rollout and campaigns in Africa.
• Sexual diversity in Africa: Research on whether sexual diversity in Africa is being taken into account to help fight against AIDS.
• Chemicals and radiation waste: How the radiation waste and chemicals in the air are affecting people.
• Mercury poisoning: The effects of Mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan, and the measures to help put the situation under control.
• Health: The health ramifications of adapting to ecology and maladaptation.
• Health: Domestic healthcare and health culture practices
• Clinic: Clinical interactions in social organizations.
• Growth: Difference between growth and development.
• Engineering: Genetic engineering and what it entails.
• Marriage: Marriage rituals in different cultures.
• Magic: Belief in magic and the supernatural.
• Mythologies: The effects it has on modern culture.
• Anthropology: How to use anthropology as forensic science.
• Heroes: Studies of heroes in different societies.
• Education: How education differs around the world.

Cultural anthropology discusses human societies and their cultural origin, vacation, history, and development. Here is a look at cultural Anthropology topics:

• Women in Africa: The various challenging roles that women in Modern Africa play and how they handle it.
• Homelessness: How homelessness affects and influences the culture and social landscapes.
• India: Methods and measures that India is taking to deal with the issue of homelessness and measures they have put in place to deal with social landscapers.
• Political science: Highlight and discuss the link between cultural anthropology and political science.
• Superstition: Research ways that superstition affects the way of life.
• Sexual discrimination: The evolution of sexual discrimination and its effects in modern times.
• African cultures: Investigating how different religions and beliefs impact African culture.
• Northern Nigeria: How the basic religious beliefs that influence forced nuptials among the children in North Nigeria.
• Gay marriage: The background on gay marriage and how it influences the cultural and social backgrounds.
• Racism: Explain racism and its existence in modern times.
• Religious practices: Ways how religious practices and beliefs affect culture.
• Culture shock: What it is and ways that people can work through it.
• Ethnocentrism: Ways that you can use to minimize it.
• Ancestors: A view of ancestors in African culture.
• Religion: Religious practices in a particular society.
• Culture: About the Rabari culture in India
• Definition of culture
• How culture anthropology links to political science
• Alcoholism: Looking into the socio-economic and cultural history in Eastern Europe.
• Assessing the effects of radioactivity on populations affected by the nuclear disaster of 2011 in Fukushima Daiichi.
• Gay marriage: Exploring the biological aspects of same-sex weddings in North America.
• Minamata disease: A critical look into the origin, populations affected, and transgenerational impact of this disease on Japan.
• Asthma disease in Yokkaichi: A critical look into the cause, people affected, and transgenerational effect on Japan.
• Itai-Itai disease: A critical look into the cause, populations affected, and transgenerational effect on Japan.
• Nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: An investigation of the transgenerational effects on the health of affected victims to this present time.
• Cocaine use in America: A critical look into the health impact on American cocaine users.
• Making Marijuana use legal in America: Possible woes and beneficial outcomes.
• Cystic fibrosis: Justifications for its preponderance in white populations in America.
• Biological Anthropology: Research on the meaning and definition of biological Anthropology and how it influences different fields.
• Paleoanthropology: Explore ways Paleoanthropology uses fossil records to draw biological anthropology compassion and conclusions regarding human evolution.
• Human social structures: Explain the development of human social structures using biological anthropology.
• Biological anthropologies: Research on some primary geographical locations where biological anthropologies used to research their work.
• Human language: Research how biological anthropology helped in the development of human language and communication.
• Body projects: The changes and the valued attributes.
• Political ecology: The Vector-borne and infectious disease.
• Clinical Interactions: What are clinical interaction and social organization?

Forensic Anthropology Research Paper Ideas

• Radioactive Carbon dating: A critical assessment of the accuracy of this dating technique.
• Human Origin: Pieces of evidential support for Creationist and Evolutionist views on the origin of man.
• Assessing the accuracy of DNA evidence testing and matching on criminology.
• Neanderthals: Exploring environmental influences and migratory paths on their survival and appearance.
• Dating Techniques: A critical review of current archaeological dating techniques.
• Ancient Egypt Mummification: A critical look at the effectiveness of the methods used.
• Nuclear disaster: A research into the impact of radioactivity on life forms due to the atomic catastrophe Chernobyl in 1986.
• A critical look into recent evidence supporting the existence of Homo habilis in the past.
• Crime Scene Forensics: Recent advances in the detection of crime.
• Postmortem Changes: Investigating the primary agents responsible for biological changes in humans.
• Criminal procedure: Research a case with a confession scenario and highlight unique features of the case.
• Criminal procedure: Do your research on the criminal proceedings in a given area and what makes them effective.
• Computer forensic: Ways that the computer forensic help in preserving electronic evidence.
• Digital forensic: Research about the history and features of digital forensic.
• History: Ways that Israel presents itself as a leader in computer forensics.
• Oncology: The latest archaeological dating methods.
• DNA: How accurate is DNA evidence in the matching and testing criminology?
• Crime detention: The recent improvements of crime detection.

So here we are! Fifty juicy topics that are all eager to wear some flesh! Ready to have an A+? Let’s do it!

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17.3 Theories and Methods

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to do the following:

• Discuss the importance of cross-cultural comparison and cultural relativism in study of human health.
• Explain why both objectivity and subjectivity are needed in the study of health.
• Discuss ethnographic research methods and their specific applications to the study of human health.
• Summarize the theoretical frameworks that guide medical anthropologists.

The Importance of Cultural Context

Culture is at the center of all human perspectives and shapes all that humans do. Cultural relativism is crucial to medical anthropology. There is a great degree of variety in the symptoms and conditions that cultures note as significant indicators of diminished health. How the sick are treated varies between cultures as well, including the types of treatments prescribed for a particular sickness. Cultural context matters, and health outcomes determined by culture are informed by that culture’s many parts. The United States, for example, relies heavily on biomedicine, treating symptoms of mental and physical illness with medication. This prevalence is not merely an economic, social, or scientific consideration, but all three. A cultural group’s political-economic context and its cultural beliefs, traditions, and values all create the broader context in which a health system exists and all impact individuals on a psychosocial level. Behaviors such as dietary choices and preferences, substance use, and activity level—frequently labeled as lifestyle risk factors—are all heavily influenced by culture and political-economic forces.

While Western cultures rely upon biomedicine, others favor ethnopharmacology and/or ritual healing. Medical anthropologists must attempt to observe and evaluate ethnomedical systems without a bias toward biomedicine. Medical anthropologists must be cautious of tendencies toward ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism in medical anthropology takes the form of using the health system of one’s own culture as a point of comparison, giving it preference when analyzing and evaluating other systems. An American anthropologist who studies ethnomedicine in the Amazon River basin must be careful to limit their bias toward a biomedical approach as much as they can. That is not to say that subjective experience and opinion need be discarded entirely, merely that bias should be acknowledged and where necessary limited. Admitting bias is the first step in combating it. Being aware of one’s own ethnocentrism allows an anthropologist to analyze culture and medicine more truthfully.

Methods of Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology is a highly intersectional subfield of anthropology. The field addresses both the biological and social dimensions of maladies and their treatments. Medical anthropologists must thus become comfortable with a wide-ranging tool kit, as diverse as health itself. Like all anthropologists, medical anthropologists rely on qualitative methods, such as ethnographic fieldwork, but they also must be able to appropriately use quantitative methods such as biometrics (including blood pressure, glucose levels, nutritional deficiencies, hormone levels, etc.) and medical statistics (such as rates of comorbidities, birth rates, mortality rates, and hospital readmission rates). Medical anthropologists can be found working in a myriad of endeavors: aiding public health initiatives, working in clinical settings, influencing health care policy, tracking the spread of a disease, or working for companies that develop medical technologies. The theories and methods of medical anthropology are invaluable to such endeavors.

Qualitative Methods

Within medical anthropology, a number of qualitative research methods are invaluable tools. Qualitative methods are hands-on, first-person approaches to research. An anthropologist in the room or on the ground writing down field notes based on what they see and recording events as they happen creates valuable data for themselves and for others.

Participant observation is a methodology in which the anthropologist makes first-person observations while participating in a culture. In medical anthropology, participant observation can take many forms. Anthropologists observe and participate in clinical interactions, shamanic rituals, public health initiatives, and faith healing. A form of participant observation, clinical observations allow the anthropologist to see a culture’s healing practices at work. Whether a doctor is treating COVID-19 or a shaman is treating a case of soul loss, the anthropologist observes the dynamics of the treatment and in some cases actually participates as a patient or healer’s apprentice. This extremely hands-on method gives the anthropologist in-depth firsthand experience with a culture’s health system but also poses a risk of inviting personal bias.

Anthropologists observe a myriad of topics, from clinical interactions to shamanic rituals, public health initiatives to faith healing. They carry these firsthand observations with them into their interviews, where they inform the questions they ask. In medical anthropology, interviews can take many forms, from informal chats to highly structured conversations. An example of a highly structured interview is an illness narrative interview. Illness narrative interviews are discussions of a person’s illness that are recorded by anthropologists. These interviews can be remarkably diverse: they can involve formal interviews or informal questioning and can be recorded, written down, or take place electronically via telephone or video conference call. The social construction of sickness and its impact on an individual’s illness experience is deeply personal. Illness narratives almost always focus on the person who is ill but can at times involve their caregivers, family, and immediate network as well.

Another method commonly used in medical anthropology, health decision-making analysis , looks at the choices and considerations that go into deciding how to treat health issues. The anthropologist interviews the decision makers and creates a treatment decision tree, allowing for analysis of the decisions that determine what actions to take. These decisions can come from both the patient and the person providing the treatment. What religious or spiritual choices might make a person opt out of a procedure? What economic issues might they face at different parts of their illness or sickness? Health decision-making analysis is a useful tool for looking at how cultures treat sickness and health, and it highlights a culture’s economic hierarchies, spiritual beliefs, material realities, and social considerations such as caste and gender.

Quantitative Methods

Quantitative methods produce numeric data that can be counted, correlated, and evaluated for statistical significance. Anthropologists utilize census data, medical research data, and social statistics. They conduct quantitative surveys, social network analysis that quantifies social relationships, and analysis of biomarkers. Analysis of census data is an easy way for medical anthropologists to understand the demographics of the population they are studying, including birth and death rates. Census data can be broken down to analyze culturally specific demographics, such as ethnicity, religion, and other qualifiers as recorded by the census takers. At times, an anthropologist may have to record this data themselves if the available data is absent or insufficient. This type of analysis is often done as a kind of background research on the group being studying, creating a broader context for more specific analysis to follow.

Also important to medical anthropologists are analyses of medical statistics . The study of medical records helps researchers understand who is getting treated for what sickness, determine the efficacy of specific treatments, and observe complications that arise with statistical significance, among other considerations. Analysis of census data combined with medical statistics allows doctors and other health providers, as well as medical anthropologists, to study a population and apply that data toward policy solutions. Famous examples include the World Health Organization’s work on health crises such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19.

Questionnaires are more personal to the anthropologist, allowing them to ask pointed questions pertinent to their particular research. Surveys make it possible for anthropologists to gather a large quantity of data that can then be used to inform the questions they ask using qualitative methods. Distribution methods for surveys vary and including means such as personally asking the questions, releasing the survey through a health care provider, or offering online surveys that participants choose to answer.

These are the most common methods used by medical anthropologists. Different theories are influential in determining which of the methods a particular research might favor. These theories inform how an anthropologist might interpret their data, how they might compose a study from beginning to end, and how they interact with the people they study. Combined with more general anthropological theory, each anthropologist must craft a composite of theory and method to create their own personalized study of the world of human health.

Theoretical Approaches to Medical Anthropology

Social health.

Biomedicine, the science-based ethnomedical system practiced in the United States, recognizes the impact physical health and mental health have on one another: when one falters, the other does as well. There is an increasing awareness in biomedicine of a third type of health, social health , which has long been recognized by many ethnomedical systems around the world. Each of the theoretical approaches to medical anthropology demonstrates that to develop a holistic understanding of human well-being, it is necessary to include mental, physical, and social health. Social health is driven by a complex set of sociocultural factors that impact an individual or community’s wellness. At a macro level, it includes the cultural and political-economic forces shaping the health of individuals and communities. An individual’s social health also includes the support a person receives from their extended social network, as well as the social pressures or stigma a person may face and the meaning that they ascribe to their experiences. Just as mental and physical health strongly influence one another, when a person’s social health falters, their physical and/or mental health declines as well.

Physical environments—whether they are natural, constructed, or modified environments—shape cultural adaptations and behaviors. People living on islands and people living in deserts inhabit very different environments that inform their cultures and affect their biology. On the other hand, culture often affects how humans interact with their environments. People who work in offices in Los Angeles and hunter-gatherers in the Amazon River basin interact with their environments differently, relying upon very different subsistence patterns and sets of material culture. Culture also informs human biology. Eating a lot of spicy foods changes a person’s biophysiology and health outcomes, as do dietary taboos such as refusing to eat pork. These dietary choices inform biology over generations as well as within a single lifetime.

The Biocultural Approach

The biocultural approach to anthropology acknowledges the links between culture and biology. Biology has informed human development and evolution, including the adaptations that have made culture, language, and social living possible. Culture, in turn, informs choices that can affect our biology. The biocultural approach analyzes the interaction between culture, biology, and health. It focuses on how the environment affects us, and the connections between biological adaptations and sociocultural ones. The biocultural approach draws on biometric and ethnographic data to understand how culture impacts health. The effects of environment on biology and culture are apparent in the treatment of survivors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident that occurred in 2011 in Japan. Studies regarding the genetic health of survivors focus on the combination of environmental damage and social stigma in Japan due to their potential exposure to radiation.

Symbolic Approach

Other theoretical approaches ask different types of questions. What does it mean to be a patient? What are the social expectations for the behaviors of a person diagnosed as suffering from a particular sickness? Why is it symbolically meaningful for a treatment to be prescribed by a medical doctor? These are questions typically asked by those utilizing a symbolic approach to medical anthropology. The symbolic approach focuses on the symbolic thinking and beliefs of a culture and how those beliefs affect social and especially health outcomes.

A person’s beliefs affect how they perceive treatments and how they experience illness. The most obvious example of the symbolic approach at work is the placebo effect . If a person believes that a treatment will be effective, this belief will affect their health outcome. Often in medical trials, people who believe they are receiving a treatment but are in fact receiving a placebo, such as a sugar pill, will demonstrate physiological responses similar to those receiving an active substance. Accounting for the placebo effect is an important consideration for all medical studies. The opposite of the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, occurs when a person believes they are not receiving an effective medicine or that a treatment is harmful. Common to both phenomena is the importance of meaning-centered responses to health outcomes. One of the most potent examples of this is voodoo death , when psychosomatic effects—that is, physical effects created by social, cultural, and behavioral factors—such as fear brought on by culture and environment cause sudden death. Related to the symbolic approach of medical anthropology is the symbolic interaction approach to health utilized by medical sociologists. Both approaches recognize that health and illness are socially constructed concepts. The symbolic interaction approach to health focuses on the roles of the patient, caregiver, and health care provider and the interactions that take place between people occupying these roles.

Medical Ecology

Another major medical anthropology theory is medical ecology . Pioneered by Paul Baker and based on his work in the Andes and American Samoa in the 1960s and 1970s, medical ecology is a multidisciplinary approach that studies the effects of environment on health outcomes. Examples of these environmental influences include food sources, environmental disasters and damage, and how environmentally informed lifestyles affect health. Whereas the biocultural approach looks at the intersection of biology and culture, medical ecology focuses instead on how environment informs both health and the culture surrounding it.

A popular example of these connections can be observed in what are termed Blue Zones , certain locations around the world where a significant number of people regularly live exceptionally long lives, many over a century. These communities can be found in the United States, Japan, Columbia, Italy, and Greece. Common links between people who live in these places include a high-vegetable, low-animal-product diet (eggs and fish are the exception), a lively social life and regular activity, and a strong sense of cultural identity.

A negative example of the links between environment and health can be viewed in the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. In this case, pollution of the city water system negatively affected health outcomes due to high exposure to lead and Legionnaires’ disease. Studies, including a long-term study by the National Institutes of Health, confirm that the water, central to the larger environment of Flint, negatively affected citizens of all ages, with particular harm caused to children and the elderly.

Cultural Systems Model

Culture is a chief consideration in another theory, the cultural systems model . Cross-cultural comparison is a core methodology for anthropology at large, and the cultural systems model is ideal for cross-cultural comparison of health systems and health outcomes. Cultures are made of various systems, which are informed by sociocultural, political-economic, and historical considerations. These systems can include health care systems, religious institutions and spiritual entities, economic organizations, and political and cultural groupings, among many others. Different cultures prioritize different systems and place greater or less value on different aspects of their culture and society. The cultural systems model analyzes the ways in which different cultures give preference to certain types of medical knowledge over others. And, using the cultural systems model, different cultures can be compared to one another.

An example of the cultural systems model at work is Tsipy Ivry ’s Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel (2009), which examines pregnancy and birth in Israel and Japan. A particular focus is how state-controlled regulation of pregnancy and cultural attitudes about pregnancy affect women differently in each society. Despite both societies having socialized medicine, each prioritizes the treatment of pregnant women and the infant differently.

In the Israeli cultural model for pregnancy, life begins at a child’s first breath, which is when a woman becomes a mother. Ivry describes a cultural model that is deeply impacted by anxiety regarding fetal medical conditions that are deemed outside the mother’s and doctor’s control. As every pregnancy is treated as high risk, personhood and attachment are delayed until birth. The state of Israel is concerned with creating a safe and healthy gene pool and seeks to eliminate genes that may be harmful to offspring; thus, the national health care system pressures women to undergo extensive diagnostic testing and terminate pregnancies that pass on genes that are linked to disorders like Tay-Sachs disease.

Japan, facing decreasing birthrates, pressures women to maximize health outcomes and forgo their own desires for the sake of the national birth rate. The cultural model for pregnancy in Japan emphasizes the importance of the mother’s body as a fetal environment. From conception, it is a mother’s responsibility to create a perfect environment for her child to grow. Mothers closely monitor their bodies, food intake, weight gain, and stressful interactions. In Japan, working during pregnancy is strongly discouraged. Ivry noted that many women even quit work in preparation for becoming pregnant, whereas in Israel mothers work right up to delivery.

The cultural systems model also allows medical anthropologists to study how medical systems evolve when they come into contact with different cultures. An examination of the treatment of mental illness is a good way of highlighting this. While in the United States mental illness is treated with clinical therapy and pharmaceutical drugs, other countries treat mental illness differently. In Thailand, schizophrenia and gender dysmorphia are understood in the framework of culture. Instead of stigmatizing these conditions as illnesses, they are understood as gifts that serve much-needed roles in society. Conversely, in Japan, where psychological diagnoses have become mainstream in the last few decades and pharmaceutical treatment is more prominent than it once was, psychological treatment is stigmatized. Junko Kitanaka ’s work on depression in Japan highlights how people with depression are expected to suffer privately and in silence. She links this socially enforced silence to Japan’s high stress rates and high suicide rates (2015). The cultural systems model offers an effective way to evaluate these three approaches toward mental illness, giving a basis of comparison between the United States, Thailand, and Japan. Assigning ethnomedicine the same value as biomedicine rather than giving one primacy over the other, this important comparative model is central to the theoretical outlook of many medical anthropologists.

The cultural systems model encompasses a myriad of cross-disciplinary techniques and theories. In many cultures, certain phrases, actions, or displays, such as clothing or amulets, are recognized as communicating a level of distress to the larger community. Examples include the practices of hanging “the evil eye” in Greece and tying a yellow ribbon around an oak tree during World War II in the United States. These practices are termed idioms of distress , indirect ways of expressing distress within a certain cultural context. A more psychologically driven consideration is the cause of people’s behaviors, known as causal attributions . Causal attributions focus on both personal and situational causes of unexpected behaviors. A causal attribution for unusual behavior such as wandering the streets haplessly could be spirit possession within the context of Haitian Vodou, while in the United States behaviors such as sneezing and blowing one’s nose might be attributed to someone not taking care of themselves.

Causal attributions can be important to one’s own illness. Anthropologist and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman has concluded that if doctors and caregivers were to ask their patients what they think is wrong with them, these explanations might provide valuable information on treatment decisions. One patient might think that their epilepsy is caused by a spirit possession. Another might suggest that their developing diabetes in inevitable because of their culture and diet. These beliefs and explanations can guide a doctor to develop effective and appropriate treatments. The approach recommended by Kleinman is known as the explanatory model. The explanatory model encourages health care providers to ask probing questions of the patient to better understand their culture, their worldview, and their understanding of their own health.

Political Economic Medical Anthropology

Another medical anthropology approach is critical medical anthropology (CMA) , which is sometimes referred to as political economic medical anthropology (PEMA) . Critical medical anthropology has a specific interest in the inequalities of health outcomes caused by political and economic hierarchies. Critical medical anthropology advocates for community involvement and health care advocacy as ethical obligations. Defining biomedicine as capitalist medicine, this approach is critical of the social conditions that cause disease and health inequalities and of biomedicine’s role in perpetuating these systemic inequalities. CMA is also interested in the medicalization of social distress, a process that has led to a wide range of social problems and life circumstances being treated as medical problems under the purview of biomedicine.

Systemic racism and structural violence create many negative health outcomes. Structural violence refers to the way in which social institutions, intentionally or otherwise, harm members of some groups within the larger society. Structural violence can affect things such as life expectancy, disability, or pregnancy outcomes and can lead to distrust of medical systems. The Tuskegee syphilis study, a decades-long “experiment” that studied the long-term effects of syphilis in Black men under the guise of medical treatment, is a prime example of structural violence at work within the United States medical system. Black men involved in the study were not told they had syphilis and were denied medical treatment for decades, with most dying of the disease. The government’s internal mechanisms for halting unethical studies failed to stop this experiment. It was only when public awareness of what was happening resulted in an outcry against the study that the experiments were stopped.

Another area of interest to medical anthropologists working with a CMA approach is how medical systems might be inherently biased toward or against certain segments of society. The research of anthropologist Leith Mullings demonstrated a lifelong focus on structures of inequality and resistance. Her work in Ghana examined traditional medicine and religious practice through a postcolonial lens, which was critical of the colonial legacy of structural inequality she observed. Her work in the United States also focused on health inequalities, with a special interest in the intersection of race, class, and gender for Black women in urban areas. It has been documented that some doctors in the United States regularly ignore the pain of women, and this is especially true in cases where the doctor displays racial bias. This tendency has been cited in several studies, including a study in The New England Journal of Medicine that found that women are more likely to be misdiagnosed for coronary heart disease based on the symptoms they give and pain levels reported (Nubel 2000). Another study in the Journal of Pain found that women on average reported pain 20 percent more of the time than men and at a higher intensity (Ruau et al. 2012). Another example of research that takes a CMA approach is Khiara Bridges ’s 2011 Reproducing Race , which brings a critical lens to pregnancy as a site of racialization through her ethnography of a large New York City hospital. This medical racism contributes to the higher rates of African American infant and maternal mortality.

Merrill Singer has done work on the role of social inequalities in drug addiction and in cycles of violence. This work has led to his development of the concept of syndemics , the social intersection of health comorbidities , or two health conditions that often occur together. For example, Japan’s hibakusha , or atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, do not live as long as Japan’s normally long-lived population and are more likely to develop multiple types of cancer and other diseases tied to their exposure to nuclear radiation. In addition to these health risks, they face heavy discrimination from the larger Japanese population due to misinformation regarding nuclear radiation and radiation contamination. This discrimination carries over to the descendants of hibakusha , who have a higher rate of cancer than the average Japanese population despite having no detectable genetic damage from the atomic bombings. Studies are ongoing as to the cultural, economic, and genetic causes of this cancer. Syndemics is highlighted in the near-century-long struggle for numerous conditions caused by the atomic bombings to be recognized as related to the atomic bombings and thus treated by the Japanese government.

Critical theories of health are an applied method, analyzing medical systems and applying critical theory, often with the goal of improving the system or improving policy. Recommendations for improvements often come out of research but may also be the starting point of a research project, as part of a data-finding mission to highlight disparity in health outcomes. Whether it is systemic racism in biomedical treatment or power discrepancies in ethnomedical rituals, critical theories of health are a key part of exploring medicine in action and understanding real medical consequences. From birth to the grave, social inequalities shape health outcomes, life expectancy, and unnecessary human suffering. Critical medical anthropology scholarship demonstrates the social forces shaping disease and health, from drug addiction to the impacts of climate change. This work becomes a self-evident call of action. It is medical anthropology in action.

Profiles in Anthropology

Angela garcia 1971-.

Personal History: Angela Garcia comes from a small town along the Mexican border with New Mexico. She credits her background and upbringing with inspiring much of her later work in anthropology. Her early experiences have led her to focus on places where political and cultural spheres combine, resulting in inequality and violence. Within this framework, she has focused on medicine, postcolonial theory, and feminism. She first attended the University of California, Berkeley, and then earned a PhD from Harvard University in 2007, shortly thereafter publishing her first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande .

Area of Anthropology: medical anthropology, feminist anthropology

Accomplishments in the Field: The Pastoral Clinic analyzes heroin addiction among Hispanic populations in New Mexico’s Rio Grande region. Garcia’s work focuses on the political and social realities that contribute to addiction and treatment, with dispossession as a central theme. The degradation of the surrounding environment and the economic decline of the Great Recession have been important factors in determining people’s life choices. Also influential has been a political reality that denies many participation or power. Garcia describes addiction as a recurring reality in the lives of many, leading them in and out of rehab in an endless cycle. Garcia also describes the damaging effects of addiction on relationships within families and communities.

Garcia joined the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University in 2016. Her work has shifted to Mexico City, where she studies coercive rehabilitation centers run by the poor. She is particularly interested in political and criminal violence and in how informal centers like these exemplify the political and social climate within the larger Mexican nation. As much as these centers embody these realities, they also try to shift power away from pathways that lead to and encourage violence. In addition to this work, Garcia has also started examining addiction and mental illness in both Mexico and the United States Latinx (Latina/o) population.

Importance of Their Work: Garcia publishes and presents frequently in preparation for books she is currently writing. Her work is crucial to understanding dispossession and power dynamics within the United States and Mexico, including how immigration and migration affect access to health care and shape identity.

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• Authors: Jennifer Hasty, David G. Lewis, Marjorie M. Snipes
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Anthropology
• Publication date: Feb 23, 2022
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-anthropology/pages/17-3-theories-and-methods

© Dec 20, 2023 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.