Critical Medical Anthropology – Development, Theses, Concepts
Keywords:
critical medical anthropology, overview, development, theses, conceptsAbstract
This paper presents the development, core theses, and concepts of critical medical anthropology. Critical medical anthropology is a branch of medical anthropology that emerged in the 1970s within the context of the paradigm shift in social sciences, which involved understanding scientific activity as a social phenomenon. Under the influence of this broader critical perspective, some medical anthropologists started to question then-current state within the subdiscipline, emphasizing political-economic aspects, which led to the establishment of critical medical anthropology. Shaped by the influence of the political economy of health, specifically the Marxist tradition on which this perspective is based, critical medical anthropology examines phenomena related to illness, health, and treatment within the context of the global capitalist system. Within this branch of medical anthropology, local-level interpretations, beliefs, practices, and experiences among members of a culture are connected to macro-level political-economic processes resulting from the global spread of capitalism. Medical anthropologists who adopt the critical perspective are interested in the effect of political-economic processes on health on the macro-level and in response to those influences on the micro-level. Their focus is on power relations primarily based on class, but those rooted in race, ethnicity, caste, region, religion, and gender are also not neglected. In critical medical anthropology, the following themes and areas of study occupy a central position: the social origins of disease and poor health; health policies, allocation of health resources, and the role of the state in health and healthcare; social relations between medical traditions at the national and transnational levels; the connection between medical systems and their political-economic context; the illness experience within the context of hegemony and resistance. Critical medical anthropology also seeks to improve the health of the studied populations and to change repressive and exploitative patterns in the health field and beyond, defining it as a key task of the discipline.
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