Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action, Edition 3

Merrill Singer · Hans Baer · Debbi Long · Alex Pavlotski

Mar 2019 · Rowman & Littlefield

About this ebook

The third edition of Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action, provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical and health anthropology. The narrative is guided by unifying themes. First, health-oriented anthropologists are very involved in the process of helping, to varying degrees, to change the world around them through their work in applied projects, policy initiatives, and advocacy. Second, the authors present the fundamental importance of culture and social relationships in health and illness by demonstrating that illness and disease involve complex biosocial processes and that resolving them requires attention to a range of factors beyond biology. Third, through an examination of the issue of health inequality, this book underlines the need for an analysis that moves beyond cultural or even ecological models of health toward a comprehensive biosocial approach. Such an approach integrates biological, cultural, and social factors in building unified theoretical understandings of the origin of ill health, while contributing to the building of effective and equitable national health-care systems.

NEW TO THIS EDITION

• All chapter have been updated or expanded.

• New Organization
  • The former chapter 6, Health Disparity, Health Inequality, is now chapter 4
  • The former chapter 7, Health and the Environment: Toward a Healthier World, is now chapter 5
  • The former chapter 4, Ethnomedicine: The Worlds of Treatment and Healing, is now chapter 6
  • The former chapter 5, Plural Medical Systems: Complexity, Complementarity, and Conflict, is now chapter 7
  • NEW: Chapter 8, The Biopolitics of Life: Biotechnology, Biocapital, and Bioethics

About the author

Merrill Singer is a professor of anthropology and senior research scientist at the Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention at the University of Connecticut.

Hans A. Baer is Principal Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

Debbi Long is a Senior Lecturer in Global Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

Alex Pavlotski is a Teaching Fellow at Aukland University, New Zeland, and an honorary research fellow at Latrobe University in Australia