Description
Book SynopsisNow in its fourth edition, Exploring Medical Anthropology provides a concise and engaging introduction to medical anthropology. It presents competing theoretical perspectives in a balanced fashion, highlighting points of conflict and convergence. Concrete examples and the authorâs personal research experiences are utilized to explain some of the disciplineâs most important insights, such as that biology and culture matter equally in the human experience of disease and that medical anthropology can help to alleviate human suffering.
The text has been thoroughly updated for the fourth edition, including fresh case studies and a new chapter on drugs. It contains a range of pedagogical features to support teaching and learning, including images, text boxes, a glossary, and suggested further reading.
Trade ReviewPraise for the new edition:
"Using the process of ethnographic fieldwork, Joralemon helps understand, address and apply knowledge on health and disease. This concise yet complete rendition of sufferers’ stories in the context of research, intervention, media coverage and health policy should be required reading in university courses on medical anthropology."
Judith Freidenberg, University of Maryland, USA
"This indispensable work solves the need for a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the anthropology of health. It can serve as the primary text for a beginning level course or, as I employ it, a template to jump start an advanced course on culture, health and healing that integrates varied literature, ethnography, and media. Topics cover the gamut from the classical, such as shamanism and the malarial origins of sickle cell, to the timely, such as TRT and the gendered politics of Zika. Engagingly written, with a biocultural bent, Joralemon’s book deftly and fairly portrays the field’s achievements without shying from its controversies."
Kathryn Oths, University of Alabama, USA
Table of Contents1. What’s So Cultural about Disease? 2. Anthropological Questions and Methods in the Study of Sickness and Healing 3. Recognizing Biological, Social, and Cultural Interconnections: Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives on a Cholera Epidemic 4. Expanding the Vision of Medical Anthropology: Critical and Interpretive Views of the Cholera Epidemic 5. The Global Petri Dish 6. Healers and the Healing Professions 7. Drugs 8. Applying Medical Anthropology 9. Anthropology and Medical Ethics 10. A Look Back and a Glance Ahead
