Bøger i Culture, Illness and Healing serien

But, in spite of the massive accumulation of data regarding culture and mental health relationships, sociocultural factors have still not been incorporated into existing biological and psychological perspectives on mental disorder and therapy.

In this book I present a series of eleven essays written between 1978 and 1987 on subjects relevant to the anthropology of health and international health.

This book concerns the use of the drug qat in North Yemen (Yemen Arab Republic), a country lying on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula.

The fieldwork upon which the book is directly based was conducted between June 1976 and December 1977 and sponsored by the F ord-Rockefeller Popula tion Policy Program, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the FUlbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Program.

The terrible power and significance attributed to maternal behavior (in particular) is a commonsense perception based on the observation that the human infant (specialized as it is for prematurity and prolonged dependency) simply cannot survive for very long without considerable maternal love and care.

Medical schools seem increasingly to be filling rare positions in the humanities and social sciences with ethicists. In their analyses of complex situations, ethicists often appear grandly oblivious to the social and cultural context in which these occur, and indeed to empirical referents of any sort.

After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word) collection, the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist, will (or at least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his taken-for-granted commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of medicine. The editors and their collaborators show the medical leviathan, warts and all, for what it is: changing, pluralistic, problematic, powerful, provocative. What medicine proclaims itself to be - unified, scientific, biological and not social, non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much. Those matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out, come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing errors and learning to conduct a shared moral dis­ course about mistakes, handling issues of competence and competition among biomedical practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on problems for which social science is a more relevant knowledge base than biological science, integrating folk and scientific models of illness in clinical communication, among a large number of highly pertinent ethnographic insights that illuminate medicine in the chapters that follow.

In the last few years there has been a great revival of interest in culture-bound psychiatric syndromes.

Similarities in our solutions led the Editors to believe that publication of our teaching experi ences and research relevant to teaching would help others and might begin the process of generating principles leading to a more coherent approach.

It presents studies of the ways Western medicines are circulated and understood in the cities and rural areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The second reason for these studies of medicines is to fill a need in medical anthropology as a field of study.

1. Patterns of Continuity and Change.- 2. Infection, Innovation and Residence: Illness and Misfortune in the Torricelli Foothills from 1800.- 3. Western Medicine and the Continuity of Belief: the Maisin of Collingwood Bay, Oro Province.- 4. Doktas and Shamans among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea.- 5. Illness and Ideology: Aspects of Health Care on Goodenough Island.- 6. Health Care and Medical Pluralism: Cases from Mount Hagen.- 7. The Place of Western Medicine in Ponam Theories of Health and Illness.- 8. The Amele and Dr Braun: a History of Early Experience with Western Medicine in Papua New Guinea.- 9. Medical Pluralism among the Yangoru Boiken.- 10. The Doctor and the Curer: Medical Theory and Practice in Kove.- 11. Gender in the Diet and Health of the Wopkaimin.- 12. Complementarity in Medical Treatment in a West New Britain Society.- 13. Modernity and Medicine among the Maring.- List of Contributors.- References.- Index of Subjects.

Here are some accounts and interpretations (but by no means all) of normal and ab normal behavior in the context of Chinese culture that we believe fashion a more discriminating understanding of at least a few important aspects of that subject.

These include: social epidemiology, health services research, social network analysis, cultural studies of illness behavior, along with chapters on the social labeling of deviance, patterns of therapeutic communication, and economic and political analyses of macro-social factors which influence health outcomes as well as services.

Over the past two decades increasing interest has emerged in the contribu tions that the social sciences might make to the epidemiological study of patterns of health and disease.

In the last few years there has been a great revival of interest in culture-bound psychiatric syndromes.

Here are some accounts and interpretations (but by no means all) of normal and ab normal behavior in the context of Chinese culture that we believe fashion a more discriminating understanding of at least a few important aspects of that subject.

Medical schools seem increasingly to be filling rare positions in the humanities and social sciences with ethicists. In their analyses of complex situations, ethicists often appear grandly oblivious to the social and cultural context in which these occur, and indeed to empirical referents of any sort.

The terrible power and significance attributed to maternal behavior (in particular) is a commonsense perception based on the observation that the human infant (specialized as it is for prematurity and prolonged dependency) simply cannot survive for very long without considerable maternal love and care.

Mental retardation in the United States is currently defined as " ... Thus, it has been known for quite some time that there is a close relationship between socio-economic status and the prevalence of mild mental retardation: higher socio-economic groups have fewer mildly retarded persons than lower groups (Hurley, 1969).

The culture of contemporary medicine is the object of investigation in this book; the meanings and values implicit in biomedical knowledge and practice and the social processes through which they are produced are examined through the use of specific case studies. The essays provide examples of how various facets of 20th century medicine, including edu­ cation, research, the creation of medical knowledge, the development and application of technology, and day to day medical practice, are per­ vaded by a value system characteristic of an industrial-capitalistic view of the world in which the idea that science represents an objective and value free body of knowledge is dominant. The authors of the essays are sociologists and anthropologists (in almost equal numbers); also included are papers by a social historian and by three physicians all of whom have steeped themselves in the social sci­ ences and humanities. This co-operative endeavor, which has necessi­ tated the breaking down of disciplinary barriers to some extent, is per­ haps indicative of a larger movement in the social sciences, one in which there is a searching for a middle ground between grand theory and attempts at universal explanations on the one hand, and the context-spe­ cific empiricism and relativistic accounts characteristic of many historical and anthropological analyses on the other.

Mental retardation in the United States is currently defined as " ... Thus, it has been known for quite some time that there is a close relationship between socio-economic status and the prevalence of mild mental retardation: higher socio-economic groups have fewer mildly retarded persons than lower groups (Hurley, 1969).

It presents studies of the ways Western medicines are circulated and understood in the cities and rural areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The second reason for these studies of medicines is to fill a need in medical anthropology as a field of study.

After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word) collection, the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist, will (or at least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his taken-for-granted commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of medicine. The editors and their collaborators show the medical leviathan, warts and all, for what it is: changing, pluralistic, problematic, powerful, provocative. What medicine proclaims itself to be - unified, scientific, biological and not social, non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much. Those matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out, come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing errors and learning to conduct a shared moral dis­ course about mistakes, handling issues of competence and competition among biomedical practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on problems for which social science is a more relevant knowledge base than biological science, integrating folk and scientific models of illness in clinical communication, among a large number of highly pertinent ethnographic insights that illuminate medicine in the chapters that follow.