Exploring Medical Anthropology

Now in its fifth edition, Exploring Medical Anthropology provides a concise and engaging introduction to medical anthropology. It presents competing theoretical perspectives in a balanced fashion, highlighting points of conflict and convergence. Concrete examples and the authors' personal research experiences are utilized to explain some of the discipline's most important insights, such as the idea that biology and culture matter equally in the human experience of illness and disease and that medical anthropology can help alleviate human suffering. This text has been thoroughly updated for the fifth edition, including new material on intersectionality, reproductive health, and public health (including Covid-19); additional material on theory and methods, including rapid ethnographic assessment; and additional ethnographic case examples and anthropological scholarship. It contains a range of pedagogical features to support teaching and learning, including images, text boxes, a glossary, and suggested further reading.

Donald Joralemon is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Smith College, USA. Mary B. Sundal is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Washburn University, USA.

1. What's So Cultural about Health, Illness, and Disease? 2. Anthropological Questions and Methods in the Study of Health and Healing 3. Recognizing Biological, Social, and Cultural Interconnections 4. Anthropological Contributions to Pandemic Studies 5. Healers and the Healing Professions 6. Biomedicine as Ethnomedicine 7. Medical Anthropology and the Global Drug Economy 8. Applying Medical Anthropology 9. Anthropology and Medical Ethics