Med Anthro Test #1

medical anthropology exam

What is the “Vita” reading about?

The reading follows a woman named Catarina who is sent to a place called Vita in Southern Brazil where she experiences “social death.”

What is “Mindful Body” about?

The “Mindful Body” describes how there are 3 different types of bodies: the individual, the social, and the body politic

What is “Voices that are more benign” about?

The reading is about a woman named Sita who had schizophrenia but she though this brought her closer to God

What is “Anthropology and the abnormal” about?

The reading looks at a man named Charles who felt like he was being haunted. This reading looks at how societies define normal.

What is ““How bodies remember” about?

“How bodies remember” explores the concept of embodied memory and how physical experiences and trauma are stored in the body in Communist China.

What is “How Medicine constructs its object” about?

The reading is about how biomedicine is a cultural system and how students learn how to see, write, and speak about the body

What is “The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates” about?

"The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates" examines how medical certificates serve as authoritative documents that validate bodily experiences and view the body as a political resource

What is “Necropolitics in the Compassionate City” about?

The reading describes how necropolitics governs the lives of Crystal and Lilah. Compassion is an instrument of domination in San Francisco.

What is medical anthropology?

It examines the wide range of experiences and practices that humans associate with disease, illness, health, and well-being

Disease

scientific term, a diagnosis

Illness

subjective term that is personal, a patient’s experience

power

explores the impact of inequality on human health through economic/political systems and viewing healthcare systems as systems of power

What do anthropologists look at to examine illness?

culture, environment, and power (CEP)

social death

a term used when a person is still biologically alive, but not accepted as fully human by the rest of society

ethnography

writing about people (their insights, voices, etc.)

agency

the power to make your own individual chocies

biopower

a form of political power that controls and regulates a person’s life. Biopower = power over bodies

Anthropologists link people to _____

the structure

What are the 3 types of bodies?

individual, social body, and body politic

Individual body

lived experience of the body’s self and cultural perception of the body

Social Body

How the body becomes a reflection of society

Body Politic

The regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies

social body structuralism

looks at how social systems affect the body

What is normality defined by?

culture

infrapolitics

a form of disguised resistance

society can be the cause of _____

illness

habitus

the normalization of norms and expectations that are acquired through socialization and experience

biomedicine bio

a medical science that views the body through the biological and physiological lens. It is a cultural system

what is a cultural system?

the interconnected network of elements within a culture, including beliefs, values, customs, traditions, rituals, symbols, and practices

biomedicine _______s reality and _______s reality

interprets, constructs

inscription

how marks, trace, and practices encode cultural meanings and power on the body

What things are part of a care assemblage?

social services, shelters, jails, hospitals, SSI, methane centers, etc.

necropolitics

when the government gets to decide who lives and who dies (ex: slavery, covid, AIDS crisis, etc.)

How is compassion domination?

there is a clear power dynamic, social services breed dependency and reinforce the hierarchy, and it is a way to control “uncontrollable” bodies

What is care infrastructure?

the network of resources, services, and systems that help people meet their care needs.

pathological

altered or caused by disease

normality is an instrument of ____

power

What is a significant quote from “Vita?”

“Vita is a progressive unraveling of the knotted reality that was Catarina’s condition—misdiagnosis, excessive medication, complicity among health professionals and family members in creating her status as a psychotic”