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Anthropology

The discipline that studies human sameness and difference across time and space, focusing on social and cultural situatedness.

Anthropos

Greek term meaning 'human being'.

Logos

Greek word meaning 'language, reason, rational, discourse'.

Subfields of anthropology

Includes physical (biological), archaeology, linguistic, social (cultural) anthropology.

Social

 in England there is a focus on social structure, economic exchange, religion, and the function of kinship. In America there is more of a focus on culture, meaning, interpretation, what does it mean

Subdisciplines of socio-cultural

• Political anthropology: ex study bureaucracy 

• Economic anthropology: ex-gift exchange, corporation 

• Anthropology of kinship: family by choice 

• Anthropology of religion: practices, rituals 

• Anthropology of ethics 

• Medical anthropology

Ethnographic research

Fieldwork involving living with people for an extended period of time to understand their culture and practices.

Participant observation

• Do stuff that people do, but also pay attention, why do they do this stuff in this way? 

• Deeply hangout 

• Can get a pretty good sense of what it’s like to live in another world or another type of life 

• They have to have brackets around what they think is right and good (because this is going to be different for different people)

Biomedicine

Modern Western scientific medicine that explains health through natural sciences and focuses on anatomy and physiology.

Medicalization

 the extension of biomedicine into other areas of life that previously were considered social rather than medical (e..g birth and dying) and the expansion of the power and influence of medical experts, sometimes even to the extent that medicine takes on a deviance control function (e.g. addiction medicine/brain disease model of addiction)

Cultural metaphors of biomedicine

Body as machine metaphor: body break down → get it fixed (more likely to be seen as object not person at the doctors) 

Diseases as combat metaphor 

• “Viruses invade body” 

• “Doctors combat disease”

• “Body fights infection”

Interpretive approach

A methodological perspective in anthropology that emphasizes understanding culture through interpretation, focusing on meanings and experiences rather than just observation. (associated w/Clifford Geertz)

• Geertz argued that culture can be interpreted as a text using the interpretive methods of hermeneutics

What is the foundational claim of interpretive approach?

disease itself is an explanatory model 

What is disease?

is primarily found within the order of meaning and human understanding, and therefore is a social construct

Consequences of interpretive approach

• Social constructivist approach that is interactivist and perspectile 

• Interpretive approach considers the interrelationship between biology, social practice, and cultural meaning 

• Embodiment as way to get past cognitive focus on mentalist approaches and look at the way social institutions, history and practice are manifest on the body

Hermeneutics

The theory of interpretation and understanding, particularly in the context of culture and meaning.(came from trying to understand religion)

Explanatory model

consists of the ideas and account of an episode of illness and its treatments that are employed by all those involved (doctors, patients, relatives, etc)

The ideas and accounts of illness and treatment held by all those involved in a medical encounter.

Critiques of Interpretive approach

• Focus on individuals as subjective experience 

• Ignores the power relations between groups and classes as factors in illness

Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA)

considers how political and economic forces of both global and societal scope are present in local health conditions and medical institutions

CMA critiques

CMA has been main stand of medical anthropology that focuses on human rights in health contexts 

• A critique is that activist assumptions too often get in the way of scholarship 

• Interpretive and anthropologist would focus on critique of macro societal and historical structures rather than local ethnographic experience 

• Gives little credit to these real people for their ability to recognize the relations of inequality that they themselves are stuck in yet must find a way to live in

What does Paul Farmer advocate for?

• Paul Farmer on the necessity of understanding structural violence as the root cause of TB epidemic in Russian prisons 

• He advocates for: 

  • Pathologies of power: the structural violence caused by inequalities based on race, ethnicity, religion, and class 

  • Structural violence: used to label the negative impact of power on health and refers to “large-scale forces —  ranging from gender inequality and racism to poverty — which structure unequal access to goods and services “ (Farmer, Connors and Simmons 1996:369)

Sovereign power

• right to take life or let it live 

  • Kings, queens, etc. most important decision that kings can make is this decision about life

Knowledge-truth - the sciences!

1. Categorize 

2. Order 

3. To come to know that which has been categorized as an order of the world

4. Control + administer 

categorization , objectification, and utility become the way to know and understand everything — how to evaluate and value

Scientism

 the idea that only science offers truth, and that truth takes the form of the law of cause and effect 

• Fully engrained in 19th century

Two basic forms of biopower

1. Disciplinary 

   1. Techniques for supervising, controlling, and shaping the individual body 

   2. Seeks to create useful & compliant bodies - Docile bodies (malleable) 

      1. Fit a role, knowledgeable and accountable to a role 

   3. Individuals who control themselves rather than being controlled through repression 

2. Regulatory - population 

   1. Not population as the sum total of individuals, but rather as an independent phenomenon 

   2. Rise of knowledge disciplines such as sociology, demographics, and statistics 

      1. Birth rates, death rates, life rates, crime rates 

   3. Security of the whole from internal danger

Practices of biopower

Seek to know or govern populations (individually or collectively) by means of exclusion, correction, normalization, disciplining, therapeutics and optimization

ex: panopticon and subjectivation

The Panopticon

A design for society where individuals self-regulate due to the potential of being observed.

Subjectivation

The manner in which subjects are brought to work on themselves, guided by scientific, medical, moral, religious, and other authorities on the basis of socially accepted arrangements of bodies and sexes

The process by which individuals internalize societal norms and expectations.

normalizing society

The process of establishing norms that regulate individual and population behavior through statistical measures.

• Norm - double meaning of normal 

  • Expectation of value, ethics, statistical norms 

• Sovereign will to decide is replaced by a relative logic of calculating, comparing, and measuring 

individual

through discipline, normalized in terms of moral and political values

population

through regulation and control is balanced at the statistical norm (e.g. birth and death rate, life expectancy, crime rate, economic productivity 

That individual or segment of the population that cannot become normalized 

• Excluded or marginalized 

• Their life is no longer fostered 

• Left to die 

Phenomenology

A philosophical approach focusing on the structures and conditions of lived experience.

a philosophical approach concerned with articulating the essential conditions or structures that make lived experience possible and meaningful 

• People have experiences and phenomenology asks how is it possible to have experience?

Ontology

theoretical and philosophical word for studying being or existence or fundamental reality

Lived experience

The unique, personal perspective through which individuals understand and interpret their experiences.

the aspectual, partial, perspectival, situated, affective, embodied, and horizon-defined and horizon-defining modes that constitute the embodied subject - the person for whom, from whom, and toward whom, existence emanates 

things that make up lived experience

• Aspectual: lived experience has an aspect to it, my perspective on something is only seeing certain aspect of something else 

  • Ex: When you look at computer screen, you are only seeing one aspect of computer screen, but there are other parts of screen that you don’t see, but you fill in other parts of screen that you don’t see 

  • Ex: experience of being ill, there are certain aspects of being ill like a cough, but you won’t be experiencing the underlying causes of the cough 

• Perspectival: my lived experience is my perspective on things (coming from my life history) 

• Affective: experience comes at (to) us and affects us 

  • We embody our experiences over time 

• Horizon-defining: horizon of meaning, frames perception, there is horizon that frames the way we understand and put meaning to experiences and we are confined by it 

• Lived experience is the singular, irreplaceable, and unique vantage point of experience (but NOT individual, always relational) 

  • Individual is not divisible 

  • Relational is singular because there is unique singularity to relational history that has accumulated over lifetime, but this unique history is a result of all the relationships you have been tied up in over life, so it comes from outside (affective) not inside (which would be individual) 

• The arc of any given particular life 

  • Each one of us has unique life trajectory 

Cartesian dualism

The idea that the mind and body are two separate entities.

Two cartesian substances

• Res cogitans- immaterial mind (thinking things) 

  • Reason, thoughts, beliefs, subject of experience

• Res extensa - material bodies (extended things) 

  • Governed by causal laws of nature 

• Human beings are a combination of these 2 things, mind and body, whereas everything else cats, trees, asteroids, water, is just simply res extensa 

Cartesian world

the container or extended space within which all these subjects and objects are located

Cartesian human

primarily defined by mind (res cogitans) and exists at a reflective distance to the world and its constituent beings such that the human’s relation to world is always one of objective reflection (science) 

Ecstatic relationality

• always outside oneself, intertwined with other humans and non-humans alike, we are this intertwining

Phenomenological worldview

continuous outpoor of relationality 

• Like fireworks, lines that are continuing 

• Relational knotting, a previous knot that has been made will effect knots made in the future 

• Each a singular being overtime that is affected by unique relational connections that alway affect the next one 

Decart

says to be human is to think

Martin heidegger

being-in-the-world 

Dasein

A term used by Heidegger referring to 'being-there', situated in a relational context or world

 there-ness as always already being situated in a relational context or world (this word just means in german, existence)

World

a dynamic web of relations that together manifest a sense or “meaning” for the totality as well as each of its interconnected “parts” 

The Hammer example

• Zuhanden: ready to hand 

  • The everyday, relational intertwinement between “things” and dasein 

  • Normal way of doing things, when we do things we do them almost habitually (like hammering a nail or typing) 

• Vorhanden: present at hand 

  • The derivative, objective, thing-being 

  • Something goes wrong and the hammer becomes present to us, it is what happens in the breakdown of normal life 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Body Schema 

The body schema is a way of trying to understand the relationality as emanating from the body and trying to think the body as constitutive of our very existence and historical contingent and open to reconfiguration

Intercorporeality

The relationally intertwined existence of one's body with others and the world.

flesh

the overlapping or intertwined relation — the connection — between “me” and the other/world

the body schema

an embodied historical record of experience, social context, emotion, taboos, and desires 

Embodiment

The experience of being in a body and how this experience is influenced by social and cultural contexts.

helps us understand how illness can be experienced differently by specific person, within different cultural contexts (e.g. overworked/burnout), and among different social groups (e.g. higher obesity or shorter life expectancy among american poor; higher rates of diabetes among black americans)

• The way in which the world comes into our bodies 

Biopower

The form of power that seeks to administer, secure, develop, and foster life, power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death

Social suffering

The collective experience of pain or hardship resulting from structural violence.

Structural violence

The social structures that harm individuals by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.

Scientism

The belief that only scientific knowledge is of real value and that it can explain everything.

Cultural construction of symptoms

The way symptoms and illnesses are interpreted and understood differently across cultures.

Relationality

The concept that existence is fundamentally about relationships and interactions between beings.

Feedback or attunement

The dynamic process of adjusting and responding to experiences and contexts over time.

Embodied action

Actions carried out through a person's physical body, influenced by their experiences, culture, and context.

Medical anthropology

Explores the complex relationships between culture, behavior, and disease within broader contexts.