Health, illness, body, and culture

One of the largest and most dynamic specialties and areas of application within anthropology is medical anthropology, which studies cultural concepts of health and illness and roles, practices, and institution of health care—and contributing to the provision and improvement of those services. After briefly tracing the history of medical anthropology, the seventh chapter compares healthcare systems across cultures, particularly Western “biomedicine” and local “ethnomedicine.” The presentation covers healing roles (including the famous “sick role”), cultural notions about the healthy and sick body, and sites of medical practice, including medical schools and hospitals. The chapter explains that healthcare is an especially fertile opportunity for applying anthropological methods and knowledge, such as in areas of public health; it also describes anthropology's long engagement with psychiatry, mental illness, and the “abnormal” individual. The chapter concludes with a discussion of medical pluralism or the fact that multiple healthcare concepts and systems often coexist in a society, which individuals may choose between or combine in their quest for healing, and a new section on the anthropology of infectious diseases with specific attention to COVID-19.