Medical anthropology, a specialization that cuts across all four fields of anthropology, contributes significantly to the understanding of sickness and suffering in the 21st century. Some of the earliest medical anthropologists were individuals trained as physicians and ethnographers who investigated the health beliefs and practices of peoples in “exotic” places while also providing them with Western medicine. Medical anthropologists during this early period translated local experiences of sickness into the scientific language of Western biomedicine. Following a reevaluation of this ethnocentric approach in the 1970s, medical anthropology emerged as a specialization that brings theoretical and applied approaches from cultural and biological anthropology to the study of human health and sickness.
Medical anthropologists study medical systems, or patterned sets of ideas and practices relating to illness. Medical systems are cultural systems, similar to any other social institution. Medical anthropologists examine healing traditions and practices cross-culturally and the qualities all medical systems have in common. For example, the terms used by French cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to describe the healing powers of shamans (the name for indigenous healers, originally from Siberia, and now applied to many traditional healers) also apply to medical practices in Europe and North America.239 240 In both situations, the healer has access to a world of restricted
Medical system A patterned set of ideas and practices relating to illness.
Knowledge (spiritual or scientific) from which the average community member is excluded.
Medical anthropologists also use scientific models drawn from biological anthropology, such as evolutionary theory, to understand and improve human health. Moreover, they have turned their attention to the connections between human health and political and economic forces, both globally and locally. Because global flows of people, germs, cures, guns, and pollution underlie the distribution of sickness and health in the world today, a broad anthropological understanding of the origins of sickness is vital for alleviating human suffering.
World History
