A Reader in Medical Anthropology

A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities brings together articles from the key theoretical approaches in the field of medical anthropology as well as related science and technology studies. The editors’ comprehensive introductions evaluate the historical lineages of these approaches and their value in addressing critical problems associated with contemporary forms of illness experience and health care.

• Presents a key selection of both classic and new agenda-setting articles in medical anthropology
• Provides analytic and historical contextual introductions by leading figures in medical anthropology, medical sociology, and science and technology studies
• Critically reviews the contribution of medical anthropology to a new global health movement that is reshaping international health agendas

Acknowledgments ix

About the Editors xiii

Introduction 1

Part I Antecedents 7

Introduction 9

1 Massage in Melanesia 15
W. H. R. Rivers

2 The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events 18
E. E. Evans-Pritchard

3 Muchona the Hornet, Interpreter of Religion 26
Victor Turner

4 The Ojibwa Self and Its Behavioral Environment 38
Irving A. Hallowell

5 The Charity Physician 47
Rudolf Virchow

6 The Role of Beliefs and Customs in Sanitation Programs 50
Benjamin Paul

7 Introduction to Asian Medical Systems 55
Charles Leslie

8 Medical Anthropology and the Problem of Belief 64
Byron J. Good

Part II Illness and Narrative, Body and Experience 77

Introduction 79

9 Medicine’s Symbolic Reality: On a Central Problem in the Philosophy of Medicine 85
Arthur M. Kleinman

10 Elements of Charismatic Persuasion and Healing 91
Thomas J. Csordas

11 The Thickness of Being: Intentional Worlds, Strategies of Identity, and Experience Among Schizophrenics 108
Ellen Corin

12 The Concept of Therapeutic ‘Emplotment’ 121
Cheryl Mattingly

13 Myths/Histories/Lives 137
Michael Jackson

14 The State Construction of Affect: Political Ethos and Mental Health Among Salvadoran Refugees 143
Janis Hunter Jenkins

15 Struggling Along: The Possibilities for Experience among the Homeless Mentally Ill 160
Robert Desjarlais

Part III Governmentalities and Biological Citizenship 175

Introduction 177

16 Dreaming of Psychiatric Citizenship: A Case Study of Supermax Confinement 181
Lorna A. Rhodes

17 Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations 199
Adriana Petryna

18 Human Pharmakon: Symptoms, Technologies, Subjectivities 213
João Biehl

19 The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as Sexed 232
Veena Das

20 Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France 245
Miriam Ticktin

Part IV The Biotechnical Embrace 263

Introduction 265

21 The Medical Imaginary and the Biotechnical Embrace: Subjective Experiences of Clinical Scientists and Patients 272
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

22 Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation 284
Lawrence Cohen

23 ‘‘Robin Hood’’ of Techno-Turkey or Organ Trafficking in the State of Ethical Beings 300
Aslihan Sanal

24 Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions 319
Marcia C. Inhorn

25 AIDS in 2006: Moving toward One World, One Hope? 327
Jim Yong Kim and Paul Farmer

Part V Biosciences, Biotechnologies 331

Introduction 333

26 Dr. Judah Folkman’s Decalogue and Network Analysis 339
Michael M. J. Fischer

27 Beyond Nature and Culture: Modes of Reasoning in the Age of Molecular Biology and Medicine 345
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

28 Immortality, In Vitro: A History of the HeLa Cell Line 353
Hannah Landecker

29 A Digital Image of the Category of the Person 367
Joseph Dumit

30 Experimental Values: Indian Clinical Trials and Surplus Health 377
Kaushik Sunder Rajan

Part VI Global Health, Global Medicine 389

Introduction 391

31 Medical Anthropology and International Health Planning 394
George M. Foster

32 Anthropology and Global Health 405
Craig R. Janes and Kitty K. Corbett

33 Mot Luuk Problems in Northeast Thailand: Why Women’s Own Health Concerns Matter as Much as Disease Rates 422
Pimpawun Boonmongkon, Mark Nichter, and Jen Pylypa

34 The New Malaise: Medical Ethics and Social Rights in the Global Era 437
Paul Farmer

35 Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life 452
Didier Fassin

Part VII Postcolonial Disorders 467

Introduction 469

36 Amuk in Java: Madness and Violence in Indonesian Politics 473
Byron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

37 The Political Economy of ‘Trauma’ in Haiti in the Democratic Era of Insecurity 481
Erica James

38 Contract of Mutual (In)Difference: Governance and the Humanitarian Apparatus in Contemporary Albania and Kosovo 496
Mariella Pandolfi

39 Darfur through a Shoah Lens: Sudanese Asylum Seekers, Unruly Biopolitical Dramas, and the Politics of Humanitarian Compassion in Israel 505
Sarah S. Willen

40 The Elegiac Addict: History, Chronicity, and the Melancholic Subject 522
Angela Garcia

Index 540

Byron J. Good is Professor of Medical Anthropology, Depart­ment of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Professor in the Department of Anthropol­ogy, Harvard University.

Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Sarah S. Willen is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. She has been an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and has taught in the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good is Professor of Social Medicine, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and in the Department of Sociology, Harvard University.

A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities brings together essays that represent key themes in the vibrant field of medical anthropology: its theoretical legacy; phenomenologies of illness and narrative, body and experience; biological citizenship; the biotechnical embrace; the new medical biosciences; global health and medicine; postcolonial power relations and the humanitarian challenges of the contemporary world.

This ground-breaking reader brings together a vital set of theoretical traditions that are deftly responsive to emergent realities in clinical medicine, biomedical science, global health, humanitarian intervention, global politics, and everyday life.

"The impressive scope of this wonderful reader, drawing on its editors' immense collective experience, offers a marvelous reframing of the foundational debates in twentieth-century medical anthropology, including both the full range of canonical readings but also several texts that should be canonical. It links these debates to a wide range of contemporary work, serving as much as an introduction to the discipline’s future as to its past."
—Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley

"This collection is distinctive for its range, depth, and most of all for its taste in theoretical ingenuity and the most compelling, memorable writing in contemporary medical anthropology."
—George Marcus, University of California, Irvine

"A Reader in Medical Anthropology is uniquely successful in assembling seminal publications representing the century-long history of medical anthropology. It is the first collection to successfully combine the diverse perspectives, epistemologies, and topical interests of contemporary medical anthropology with its intellectual wellsprings."
—Allan Young, McGill University

"This collection of classic and innovative essays adds lustre and new, surprising facets to the anthropology of medicine. It crystallizes the most important and compelling cultural analysis of human disease and social suffering, personal trauma, and global insecurity."
—Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney