Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology studies health, illness, and healing as cultural and social phenomena across societies.

Scope

It covers cultural conceptions of illness, healing systems, the experience of suffering, and the social and political dimensions of health.

Core questions

• How do cultures understand illness and healing?
• How do medical systems vary across societies?
• How is illness experienced and given meaning?
• How do power and inequality shape health?

Key concepts

• Illness vs disease
• Explanatory models
• Ethnomedicine
• Healing systems
• Suffering
• Critical medical anthropology

Key theories

Medicine, magic, and religion

Rivers studied non-Western medical systems as coherent cultural practices.

Explanatory models

Kleinman analysed healing across cultures and introduced patients' and healers' 'explanatory models' of illness.

History

From early studies of non-Western medicine (Rivers), medical anthropology matured with interpretive (Kleinman) and critical approaches linking health to culture, meaning, and political economy.

Debates

Biomedicine as one ethnomedicine

Whether Western biomedicine should itself be analysed as a cultural system among others.

Key figures

• W. H. R. Rivers
• Arthur Kleinman

Seminal works

• rivers-1924
• kleinman-1980

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between illness and disease in medical anthropology?

'Disease' refers to biological pathology; 'illness' to the patient's culturally shaped experience of being unwell.