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Teaching from the Crossroads:: On Religious Healing in African Diaspora Contexts in the Americas

Linda L. Barnes

in Teaching African American Religions

This chapter proposes two ways to study religion and healing. The first outlines a program that involves an urban ethnographic study of culturally/religiously based approaches to healing in the ... More

This chapter proposes two ways to study religion and healing. The first outlines a program that involves an urban ethnographic study of culturally/religiously based approaches to healing in the African Diaspora communities of Boston, Massachusetts. The second relates to ways in which findings from the first kind of course can be incorporated into different levels of medical education, thereby introducing a highly-focused aspect of religious studies into the training of biomedical clinicians.Less

The New Wave of Ethnographies in Medical Anthropology

Arthur Kleinman

in Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine

This chapter aims to survey the present phase of medical anthropology through a close reading of recent ethnographies that represent the different approaches to the field, and tries to understand why ... More

This chapter aims to survey the present phase of medical anthropology through a close reading of recent ethnographies that represent the different approaches to the field, and tries to understand why ethnographies are effective within the area of health and healing. It also studies the process of contributing in the scholarly engagement with the literature, which it considers an important intersubjective practice of participating in the building of an academic field. Ideas such as medicine as a social idiom and medical ethnography are introduced.Less

Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money

Marjorie Topley

Jean DeBernardi (ed.)

in Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money

This book collects the published articles of Dr. Marjorie Topley, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the postwar period. Her ethnographic research in Singapore and Hong Kong ... More

This book collects the published articles of Dr. Marjorie Topley, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the postwar period. Her ethnographic research in Singapore and Hong Kong sets a high standard for urban anthropology. Dr. Topley's publications reflect her training in British social anthropology, with its focus on fieldwork and detailed empirical observation. She was among the first to refine and extend those methods in the 1950s, adapting them to the study of modernizing urban settings like Singapore and Hong Kong. Her ethnographic research on the Great Way of Former Heaven sectarian movement and Cantonese women's vegetarian halls in Singapore in the 1950s was an early contribution to the study of sub-cultural groups in a complex urban society, and she asked insightful questions about the relationship between religion, secularism, and modernity. She also broke new ground in the field of Chinese medical anthropology.Less

Narrative As Construct and Construction

Cheryl Mattingly and Linda C. Garro

in Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing

This introductory chapter discusses narrative as a theoretical construct and within the context of anthropology and medicine. It then examines the succeeding chapters and situates them within broader ... More

This introductory chapter discusses narrative as a theoretical construct and within the context of anthropology and medicine. It then examines the succeeding chapters and situates them within broader trends. These trends are not limited to medical anthropology or to cultural anthropology, but extend into various disciplines. It examines the centrality of narrative to some forms of therapeutic practice and discusses the definition of the term “story” and the different uses of the narrative form. The chapter also studies some important terms related to the narrative construct and views the narrative as a form of communication, representation, and construction of self.Less

Anthropological Contributions to the Development of Culturally Appropriate Tobacco Cessation Programs: A Global Health Priority

Mark Nichter, Mimi Nichter, Siwi Padmawti, and C.U. Thresia

in Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society

This chapter describes Project QTI, a pioneering attempt to find out what we need to know to successfully carry out tobacco cessation in clinical and community settings. Formative research carried ... More

This chapter describes Project QTI, a pioneering attempt to find out what we need to know to successfully carry out tobacco cessation in clinical and community settings. Formative research carried out in India and Indonesia is described. Both countries have high prevalence rates of tobacco use across all social classes, popular indigenous as well as imported tobacco products, few cessation activities, and no established tobacco curriculum in medical schools. A biopolitical model is presented for encouraging systematic assessment of tobacco dependency at the sites of the body, environment, and state. The tobacco control field recognizes the value of transdisciplinary research. The chapter describes Project QTI's ongoing attempts to build a community of tobacco cessation practice that spans both efforts to encourage individuals to quit tobacco use and communities to establish smoke free households and worksites.Less

Introduction: The Health Consequences of War

Andrea Mazzarino, Marcia C. Inhorn, and Catherine Lutz

in War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

War holds consequences for people and their communities that include death, disease, environmental deterioration, and the loss of social services such as quality healthcare. This chapter introduces ... More

War holds consequences for people and their communities that include death, disease, environmental deterioration, and the loss of social services such as quality healthcare. This chapter introduces some of these far-reaching public health consequences of armed combat, drawing on literature from medical anthropology and ethnographies of armed combat from around the world. Based on medical anthropologists BaylaOstrach and Merrill Singer’s concept of “the syndemics of war,” the authors point to multiple routes through which war affects human health. The chapter argues that the US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan should be understood as having various far-reaching effects on human health.Less

Ira E. Harrison: Activist, Scholar, and Visionary Pioneer

Alisha R. Winn

in The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology

This essay explores the professional journey of scholar, activist, and pioneer Ira E. Harrison. Harrison was cofounder of the Association of Black Anthropologists and the organization’s first ... More

This essay explores the professional journey of scholar, activist, and pioneer Ira E. Harrison. Harrison was cofounder of the Association of Black Anthropologists and the organization’s first archivist. His educational path, activism in the 1960s, ethnographic research in the black church, and commitment to preserving and recognizing the contributions of black anthropologists, renders him a revolutionary pioneer in anthropology. He has conducted research on traditional medicine and integration on health policy and coedited African American Pioneers in Anthropology with Faye Harrison.Less

Using Formative Research to Explore and Address Elder Health and Care in Chiapas, Mexico

Namino Glantz

in Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society

Demographic and epidemiological transitions in an era of social and economic uncertainty have provoked a pervasive elder health care crisis. Engaged anthropology using formative research is ... More

Demographic and epidemiological transitions in an era of social and economic uncertainty have provoked a pervasive elder health care crisis. Engaged anthropology using formative research is propitious for addressing elder health and care needs. Formative research is an iterative, multistage participatory process that draws on multiple methods and actors to develop, monitor, and assess community-congruent interventions. It entails becoming informed about and informing community dialogue; identifying needs and resources; generating intervention options via critical assessment and problem solving; and monitoring process, outcome, and responses. This chapter details how formative research was conducted in a small city in Chiapas (Mexico's southernmost state) to improve primary elder health care while engaging elders, care providers, researchers, and media.Less

Ethnographic approaches to health experiences research

Joseph D. Calabrese

in Understanding and Using Health Experiences: Improving patient care

Clinical Ethnography: Ethnographic Approaches to Health Experiences Research. This chapter introduces ethnographic (participant observation) approaches to study of health experiences. Ethnographers ... More

Clinical Ethnography: Ethnographic Approaches to Health Experiences Research. This chapter introduces ethnographic (participant observation) approaches to study of health experiences. Ethnographers studying health experiences immerse themselves in sociocultural contexts of illness and treatment for prolonged fieldwork periods to collect descriptive data and form an understanding of local culture and embodied experience. They pay close attention to insiders’ views in natural contexts and go for a depth of understanding rather than large sample sizes. This chapter discusses the origins of ethnography in the anthropological study of small scale societies and the subsequent application of the approach in hospitals and other medical settings. The chapter will discuss strengths of the approach (e.g. that it takes into account what people do as well as what they say and allows us to discover new information) as well as limitations (e.g. that it is time consuming and requires a special personal commitment by the researcher).Less

Suffering and Its Professional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal Experience

Arthur Kleinman

in Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine

This chapter studies suffering and how it can be included in an ethnography of interpersonal experience. It first studies an effective strategy used in medical anthropology, which demonstrates how a ... More

This chapter studies suffering and how it can be included in an ethnography of interpersonal experience. It first studies an effective strategy used in medical anthropology, which demonstrates how a patient's illness convictions and complaints reproduce a certain moral domain. The chapter introduces the anthropologists' interpretive dilemma and enumerates the categories for the ethnography of experience. Next, it examines the suffering that is associated with illness and its social sources, and presents a case study of a person who has experienced great suffering. From there the chapter looks at suffering in Chinese culture and the limitations of a cultural analysis on suffering.Less

Return of the First Person Singular

Alphonso Lingis

in Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality

Phenomenology had taken consciousness in the first person to be the origin of meanings. For the postmodern philosophy of mind meanings are articulated in the taxonomic contrasts, semantic systems, ... More

Phenomenology had taken consciousness in the first person to be the origin of meanings. For the postmodern philosophy of mind meanings are articulated in the taxonomic contrasts, semantic systems, grammatical forms, and rhetorical paradigms of languages, which are social and institutional productions. But anthropological field researchers find that the ideology or the mythical or religious elaborations of a community are very unevenly present in the understanding of any informant. To understand what an informant means the researcher has to envision how he or she acts in a practical and social field. Medical anthropologists find that a patient has to compose his own account of the impact of his illness on his family, his work, his sense of the life he henceforth has to lead and the death that he has to face. Anthropological researchers who study the private religions elaborated by psychotics have come to recognize their positive and productive function.Less

Introduction: Possession, Identity, and Power: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

Lesley A. Sharp

in The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town

This chapter discusses the themes of women, migration, and power in relation to spirit possession and identity in northwest Madagascar. The setting is Ambanja, a booming migrant town in the heart of ... More

This chapter discusses the themes of women, migration, and power in relation to spirit possession and identity in northwest Madagascar. The setting is Ambanja, a booming migrant town in the heart of a prosperous plantation region called the Sambirano Valley, where identity is shaped by polyculturalism and manipulated through religious experience. Healing rituals, involving possession by ancestral tromba spirits, provide an important arena in which to articulate the problems of urban life. In this latter respect, the chapter explores the subjects in medical anthropology. A key assumption that runs throughout the chapter from Madagascar is that, first, inequality and power are often significant factors for understanding health and well-being. This is true not only within highly complex and stratified Western societies, but also in smaller communities in the Third World, where colonial policies and relations have either introduced new forms of inequality and stratification or exacerbated older ones.Less

A Broken Recovery

Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman

in A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering

This chapter surveys contemporary developments in research and writing on social suffering via a critical dialogue with C. Wright Mills’s account of the “sociological imagination.” Mills’s ... More

This chapter surveys contemporary developments in research and writing on social suffering via a critical dialogue with C. Wright Mills’s account of the “sociological imagination.” Mills’s sociological imagination is explored with reference to his concern to redevelop sociology as a form of critical pragmatism. We take steps to explain how our project might be compared to that initiated by Mills, but we emphasize that we are not so much concerned with critique as an end in itself but rather with the development of a form of social inquiry that operates for the promotion of caregiving. In this regard, we explain our own indebtedness to classical traditions of pragmatism (especially the works of William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams). We offer a critical review of how social suffering is now being featured as an issue for inquiry and debate in contemporary sociology and anthropology.Less

Caregiving

Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman

in A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering

This chapter develops the arguments of the last, focusing on the practice of caregiving. Our interest lies in caregiving not only as a moral and social practice but also as a form of social pedagogy. ... More

This chapter develops the arguments of the last, focusing on the practice of caregiving. Our interest lies in caregiving not only as a moral and social practice but also as a form of social pedagogy. We argue that while caregiving should be promoted as a social value, it should also be taken up as a component of social inquiry. As a practice, caregiving involves individuals in activities that expose them to forms of social understanding that are denied to those who merely observe or think about social life. The social understanding gained through practices of caregiving is our concern here. This is explored via an account of Jane Addams’s approach to “doing sociology,” with examples from her work in Hull-House. We celebrate Addams as an early advocate of the type of social understanding and sociological/anthropological practice that we are seeking to promote. We also outline some ways in which this is liable to be left compromised and frustrated within the culture and institutions of the modern university and the pressures placed upon academics to conform to the norms of “career” and the quest for recognition in terms of standards technical expertise. Notwithstanding these pressures, we review some ways in which medical anthropology might operate to institute approaches to social inquiry similar to those advocated by Addams.Less