Trostle, J. (1986). Frühe Arbeiten in der Anthropologie und Epidemiologie: Von der Sozialmedizin zur Keimtheorie, 1840 bis 1920. In C. R. Janes, R. Stall, & S. M. Gifford (eds.), Anthropologie und Epidemiologie: Interdisziplinäre Ansätze zur Erforschung von Gesundheit und Krankheit. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel. The paper presents a current paradigm of contemporary medical anthropology – critical medical anthropology (CMA), which combines political-economic approaches with a culturally sensitive analysis of human behavior based on anthropological methods. It is characterized by a strong focus and dedication to improving population health and promoting health equity.
The beginning of the CMA dates back to the 1970s, when the interdisciplinary movement called the political economy of health was developed. Today, the CMA has become one of the top three perspectives used in anthropological research that deals with health, disease, and well-being. The author discusses the origins, key concepts and usefulness of the CMA for social research and its importance for the development of effective public health policy. Exemplary interventions and ethnographic research are introduced and wider use of this work and methods by bureaucrats and medical staff is advocated to understand patient behaviour and the influence of social, economic and political factors on the functioning of certain health systems. In 1983, the term “critical medical anthropology” was introduced (Baer, 1990). This new type of medical anthropology resembled the new reflexive social anthropology in that it was critical, holistic, and inward-looking: “It was the work of anthropology that was directed toward ourselves, our own society” (Scheper-Hughes, “Three Propositions”: 196). Scheper-Hughes (2000) draws explicit parallels between colonial social anthropology and clinical medical anthropology, arguing that medical anthropologists played a crucial role in establishing the cultural hegemony of biomedicine (Cambell, 2011). Critical medical anthropology has focused on understanding the origins of dominant cultural constructs in health care, including the interests of social class, gender, or ethnic group that express certain health concepts, and under what historical conditions they arise (Singer and Baer, 2007: 33). Critical medical anthropology highlights how the neoliberal economic system continues to shape the pandemic through the trade-related aspects of vaccine regulation through vaccine regulation through intellectual property rights regulation (TRIPS) and the unequal distribution of mortality within and between nations – among others. McElroy, A., & Townsend, P. K.
(1996). Medical Anthropology in Ecological Petrective (3rd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. The disciplines of biomedicine and global health are at the heart of understanding and finding solutions to the current COVID-19 pandemic. We are grateful for the record speed of vaccine development, the thoroughness with which the virus is being tracked to identify and respond to new variants, developments in hospital care and treatments that have helped reduce the mortality rate, and the breadth of research that analyzes gender and gender differences, the reasons for the over-representation of Black and ethnic minorities, and the extent of research that analyzes gender and gender differences, the reasons for the over-representation of Black and ethnic minorities, and more broadly social. Determinants of COVID-19 mortality. However, global health, through its transnational positionality, almost always reproduces in local situations a “global” coronavirus-centric framework that homogenizes the pandemic from a primarily biomedical perspective, from which the social sciences often look from the outside. Scheper-Hughes, N., and Lock, M. (1987). The conscious body: a prolegomenon for future work in medical anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly (NS), 1, 6-41.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1990). Three theses for a critically applied medical anthropology. Social Sciences and Medicine, 30, 189-197. Duana Fullwiley: Professor Fullwiley studies how global and historical notions of health, disease, race, and power lead to biological consequences that affect scientific definitions of human differences. Through ethnographic engagement with geneticists and the populations they study, she emphasizes the importance of extending the conceptual ground of genetic causality to poverty and persistent racial stratification. She writes explicitly in the long history of inequality and dispossession suffered by the world`s minorities, often absent from medical accounts of genetic diseases and ideas of “population-based” gravity. Working in France, West Africa and the United States, she describes the historical impact of postcolonial, postcolonial, post-reconstruction and progressive scientific policies on today`s health outcomes.
He also records the remnants of racist thinking in the genetic research of the new population and works with scientists to remedy them.
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