A suffering persons own understanding of his or her distress
What is Illness?
A state of physical, emotional, and mental well-being, together with an absence of disease or disability that would interfere with such well-being.
What is health?
Events in life generated by forces and agents external to the person and their control. Specifically events generated in the setting of armed conflict and war.
What is Trauma?
Social positions people are assigned at birth
What are ascribed statuses?
Forms of biological impairment identified and explained within the discourse of bio-medicine.
What is Disease?
Western forms of medical knowledge and practice based on biological science.
What is biomedicine?
An adjustment by an organism that undermines the ability to cope with environmental challenges of various kinds.
What is maladaptation?
Adjustments by an organism that help them cope with environmental challenges of various kinds.
What is Adaptation?
Classifications of physical, mental, and emotional distress recognized by members of a particular cultural community.
What is sickness?
The specialty of anthropology that concerns itself with human health - the factors that contribute to disease or illness and the ways that human populations deal with disease or illness.
What is medical anthropology?
Violence that results from the way that political and economic forces structure risk for various forms of suffering within a population.
What is structural violence?
Social identities based on a shared medical diagnosis.
What is Biosociality?
The forms of physical, mental, or emotional distress experienced by individuals who may or may not subscribe to biomedical understandings of disease.
What is suffering?
Political organization around a biosocial identity in order to demand health related- interventions by the state or other organizations.
What is health activism?
The physical toll that inequality takes on peoples bodies.
What is embodied inequality?
Sickness (and the therapies to relieve them) that are unique to a particular cultural group.
What are culture bound syndromes?
The combined effects on a population of more than one disease. The effects of which are exacerbated by poor nutrition, social instability, violence, or other stressful environmental factors.
What is a syndemic?
Government recognition of citizens health needs and to intervene on their behalf.
What is biological citizenship?
The processes through which individuals or groups are excluded from material resources and societal belonging on multiple levels of political economy.
What is social exclusion?
Human culture practices influenced by natural selection on genes that affect human health.
What are biocultural adaptations?