Define the Term
This term refers to the integration of biological and cultural perspectives in understanding human health and behavior
What is "biocultural"?
Biocultural anthropology examines the relationship between these two broad aspects of human life to understand health and disease.
What are biology and culture?
Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) introduced a framework describing three bodies central to medical anthropology. What are these three bodies?
What are the individual body, the social body, and the body politic?
According to this approach, the exposures acting during a critical window of biological development can alter the structure or function of organs, tissues, or body systems and which, in turn, predispose people to disease at a later age.
What is The life Course approach?
This foundational medical anthropology text introduces the fields of biomedicine and biocultural anthropology.
What is Medical Anthropology: An Introduction to the Fields by Brown et al.?
This term refers to how social and structural inequalities shape biological outcomes.
What is "embodiment"?
This early biocultural study by Livingstone (1958) linked malaria prevalence to the distribution of this genetic trait.
What is the sickle cell gene?
Proposed Cartesian dualism, the idea that the mind and body are separate entities.
What is (who is) Rene Descartes
the idea that the mind and body are separate entities
What is Cartesian dualism?
Scheper-Hughes and Lock's "The Mindful Body" introduces this type of framework for analyzing health and illness.
What is a three-body framework?
Individuals actively experience their environment, through this foundational concept in medical anthropology
What is 'The body"?
Wiley and Cullin (2016) describe biocultural approaches as holistic. How does this differ from the reductionism of biomedicine?
What is the focus on integrating social, cultural, and biological factors versus isolating purely biological mechanisms?
Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) describe the "body politic" as the regulation and control of bodies by institutions. Name one way this can manifest in modern societies.
What are healthcare policies, surveillance, or reproductive rights?
What are pivotal time points across the life course?
What is in utero and age range 45-60
5 basic approaches to medical anthropology
what is biological ecological ethnomedical critical and applied
Gravlee (2009) argues that this social construct shapes health disparities by becoming part of biological processes.
What is race?
Gravlee (2009) discusses how race becomes biology. Propose one way social inequality might directly alter biological processes over time.
What is chronic stress causing dysregulation of cortisol, leading to inflammation and disease?
In his 2009 paper, Clarence Gravlee critiques this long-standing fallacy that treats racial differences as purely biological.
What is biological determinism?
What famine is a monumental study highlighting the importance of the life course approach?
What is the Dutch Famine
This theoretical framework argues that health disparities are shaped by the intersection of social structures and individual biology, focusing on how long-term exposure to inequality affects health outcomes.
What is the ecosocial theory or embodiment of inequality?
Medical anthropologists distinguish between these three terms: one refers to the biological dysfunction diagnosed by a clinician, another to the individual's subjective experience of suffering, and the last to the social recognition and response to the condition.
What are disease, illness, and sickness?
Explain how the distribution of the sickle cell gene in West Africa illustrates the interplay between culture, environment, and biology.
What is the relationship between agricultural practices, mosquito exposure, and genetic adaptation to malaria?
According to Gravlee, racial disparities in health arise due to this form of stress, which results from persistent exposure to discrimination and socioeconomic disadvantage.
What is chronic stress?
embodiment advances three critical claims. What is one of them?
What is
(1) bodies tell stories about—and cannot be studied divorced from—the conditions of our existence
(2) bodies tell stories that often—but not always—match people’s stated accounts; (3) bodies tell stories that people cannot or will not tell, either because they are unable, forbidden, or choose not to tell.
Medical anthropology is a diverse field, unified by several core ideas. What key concept connects its various approaches?
what is 1)Illness and healing are universal experiences 2) Disease is influenced by cultural, environmental, and sociopolitical circumstances 3)The body is the product of cultural influences and interpretation 4) How cultures understand their own healing has significant influence on the acceptability, efficacy, and improvement through health care initiatives