The Anthropology of Health and Healing
The Anthropology of Health and Healing

Author: Mari Womack

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780759110441

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The Anthropology of Health and Healing provides the first holistic approach to the study of medical anthropology. Over the past two decades, medical anthropology has been the most rapidly growing subfield in anthropology, and a number of medical anthropology texts have been published, focusing primarily on public policy and health care delivery systems. Yet while anthropologists have researched topics related to medical anthropology for more than one hundred years, here Mari Womack thoroughly surveys this richly diverse field and provides an integrated approach that links together the biological, psychological, social, communicative, epidemiological, philosophical, historical, and developmental factors that shape health and healing. Book jacket.

Plants, Health and Healing
Plants, Health and Healing

Author: Elisabeth Hsu

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0857456334

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Plants have cultural histories, as their applications change over time and with place. Some plant species have affected human cultures in profound ways, such as the stimulants tea and coffee from the Old World, or coca and quinine from South America. Even though medicinal plants have always attracted considerable attention, there is surprisingly little research on the interface of ethnobotany and medical anthropology. This volume, which brings together (ethno-)botanists, medical anthropologists and a clinician, makes an important contribution towards filling this gap. It emphasises that plant knowledge arises situationally as an intrinsic part of social relationships, that herbs need to be enticed if not seduced by the healers who work with them, that herbal remedies are cultural artefacts, and that bioprospecting and medicinal plant discovery can be viewed as the epitome of a long history of borrowing, stealing and exchanging plants.

Culture, Disease, and Healing
Culture, Disease, and Healing

Author: David Landy

Publisher: New York : Macmillan

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13:

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Abstract: An historical perspective of disease and healing practices as related to culture is addressed in 57 papers for students and professionals in the medical and health fields. The papers are organized among 14 major themes, addressing: medical anthropology; paleopathology; disease ecology and epidemiology; medical systems and theories relative to disease and therapy; sociocultural influences and ethnic practices in disease diagnosis; sorcery and witchcraft; disease prevention via social controls; surgery practices and population control in the preindustrial era; cultural and environmental factors relative to stress, pain, and death; cultural influences on behavioral disorders; the special role of the inflicted in society; and current primitive healing practices and the impact of sociocultural change on such practices. (wz).

Health Psychology
Health Psychology

Author: Elizabeth D. Whitaker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 1237

ISBN-13: 1317347897

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This reader looks at both the biological and cultural aspects of health and healing within a comparative framework. Health and Healing in Comparative Perspective provides both fascinating comparative ethnographic detail and a theoretical framework for organizing and interpreting information about health. While there are many health-related fields represented in this book, its core discipline is medical anthropology and its main focus is the comparative approach. Cross-cultural comparison gives anthropological analysis breadth while the evolutionary time scale gives it depth. These two features have always been fundamental to anthropology and continue to distinguish it among the social sciences. A third feature is the in-depth knowledge of culture produced by anthropological methods such as participant-observation, involving long-term presence in and research among a study population. For medical anthropology, medical sociology, public health, nursing courses.

Empathy and Healing
Empathy and Healing

Author: Vieda Skultans

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2008-03-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0857450360

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For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language.

The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa
The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa

Author: Steven Feierman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1992-09-22

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 9780520066816

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These essays are an account of disease, health and healing practices on the African continent. The contributors all emphasize the social conditions linked to ill health and the development of local healing traditions, from Morocco to South Africa and from the precolonial era to the present.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa
A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

Author: Roy Richard Grinker

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-02-06

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1119251486

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An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

Curing and Healing
Curing and Healing

Author: Andrew Strathern

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13:

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This book is a part of the Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology series. Throughout history and throughout the world today, problems of health, sickness, and medical treatment have been intimately interwoven with social, cultural, and political life generally. Medical anthropology deals with these problems from a biocultural perspective, recognizing the deep connections between cultural patterns, historical change, and life processes. This book draws on a rich array of ethnographic cases from around the world to demonstrate the complexities of ideas and practices that surround the health of the human body, and how health is impacted by the beliefs and practices of the community. The authors make particular use of new materials from their field areas among the Hagen and Duna people in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The book is intended as a textbook useable for both anthropology courses and courses for medical students. The topics covered include a survey of earlier works in medical anthropology, regimens of bodily treatment, sex and reproduction, medical pluralism, doctor-patient communication, epidemiology, ethnopsychiatry, illness and the emotions, and how diseases such as AIDS have altered the ways in which individuals see themselves and "traditional" practices alter to accommodate new diseases. Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart are a husband and wife anthropological team who work in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and the Lowlands of Scotland.

The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine
The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine

Author: Anamaria Iosif Ross

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-27

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1000180743

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Alternative medicine is not a fashionable new trend but an established cultural strategy, as well as a dynamic feature of mainstream contemporary medicine, in which elements of folk traditions are often blended with western scientific approaches.The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine is a concise yet wide-ranging exploration of non-biomedical healing. The book addresses a broad range of practices including: substance, energy and information flows (e.g. helminthic therapy); spirit, consciousness and trance (e.g. shamanism); body, movement and the senses (e.g. reiki and aromatherapy); as well as classical medical traditions as complements or alternatives to Western biomedicine (e.g. Ayurveda). Exploring the cultural underpinnings of contemporary healing methods, while assessing current ideas, topics and resources for further study, this book will be invaluable to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and health related professions such as nursing, physical and occupational therapy, and biomedicine.