Anthropology 201 - Test 3

Health

The absence of disease and infirmity as well as the presence of physical, mental, and social well-being.

Disease

A discrete natural entity that can be clinically identified and treated by a health professional.

Illness

The individual patient's experience of being unwell.

Sickness

An individual's public expression of illness and disease, including social expectations about how one should behave and how others should respond.

Ethnomedicine

Local systems of health and healing rooted in culturally specific norms and values.

Ethnopharmacology

The documentation and description of the local use of natural substances in healing remedies and practices.

Biomedicine

A practice, often associated with Western medicine, that seeks to apply the principles of biology and the natural sciences to the practice of diagnosing diseases and promoting healing.

Medical pluralism

The intersection of multiple cultural approaches to healing.

Illness narratives

The personal stories people tell to explain their illnesses.

Human microbiome

The complete collection of microorganisms in the human body's ecosystem.

Health transition

The significant improvements in human health made over the course of the twentieth century; they were not, however, distributed evenly across the world's population.

Critical medical anthropology

An approach to the study of health and illness that analyzes the impact of inequality and stratification within systems of power on individual and group health outcomes.

What are the 3 different approaches medical anthropologists take to illness and health?

Disease, Illness, Sickness

Western Biomedical Approach

This system draws heavily on European enlightenment values of rationality, individualism, and progress. The individual body is the focus of treatment. Diagnosis and treatment are based on rational scientific data. And there is a firm conviction that direct intervention through surgery and medications based on scientific facts will positively affect health.

Chinese Medicine

Conceptualizes health as a harmonious relationship between Heaven and Earth. An individual’s qi—translated as “breath” or “air” and referring to an energy found in all living things—must be balanced and flowing in equilibrium with the rest of the universe for that person to be healthy. Illness occurs when the qi is blocked and the flow and balance are disrupted. Acupuncture, tuina (therapeutic massage), acupressure, moxibustion (the burning of herbs near the skin), and the consumption of healing herbs and teas.

Tibetan Amchi

Amchi medicine is based on achieving bodily and spiritual balance between the individual and the surrounding universe. Amchis diagnose ailments by asking questions of the patient, examining bodily wastes, and carefully taking the patient’s pulse. Recommended treatments include changes in diet and behavior—both social and religious—and the use of natural medicines made from local plants and minerals.

Paul Farmer

Visited Cange, Haiti, in 1983. Many residents were water refugees, pushed out by dam construction. Farmer listened to residents’ needs and experiences and working with them to identify and treat their public health problems.

Environmental anthropology

The study of relations between humans and the environment.

Anthropocene

The current geologic era in which human activity is reshaping the planet in permanent ways.

Multispecies ethnography

Ethnographic research that considers the interactions of all species living on the planet in order to provide a more-than-human perspective on the world.

Ecotourism

Tours of remote natural environments designed to support local communities and their conservation efforts.

Settler colonialism

Displacement and pacification of Indigenous people and expropriation of their lands and resources.

How does a multispecies perspective change our worldview and our future?

These multispecies ethnographies instead foreground nature, placing humans firmly in the natural environment. By exploring the deep interconnections among humans and other living beings, they seek to open new possibilities for humans and all life-forms that share our planet.

How does the environment intersect with other systems of power to create uneven vulnerability to climate change?

Climate change disproportionately affects the people least involved in it’s cause, such as poor black communities in new york having factories built in their hometowns or farmers being affected by pesticides that cause chronic illness due to agricultural standards. etc etc

How do anthropologists study ecotourism in relation to the environment?

Ecotourism is promoted as a way for visitors to see the natural wonders of the world while supporting ecological conservation and cultural survival. Ecotourists hope their visits will provide alternative sources of income for local communities and so protect the environment from damage from extractive industries like oil drilling, mining, and logging.

In contrast to these tourist fantasies, Davidov’s research reveals marginalized yet competent Indigenous communities creatively navigating new cultural forms of globalization.

Is today's global economic system sustainable?

No. Studies suggest that as early as 1980, humans began to use more resources than the planet could regenerate. Today, our consumption of the world’s resources has stretched above 75 percent over sustainable levels. In other words, at our current rate of consumption, it would take 1.75 Earths to sustain our rate of resource use and absorb our pollution using prevailing technologies. This is what scientists call “ecological overshoot.”

Economy

A cultural adaptation to the environment that enables a group of humans to use the available land, resources, and labor to satisfy their needs and to thrive.

Food foragers

Humans who subsist by hunting, fishing, and gathering plants to eat.

Pastoralism

A strategy for food production involving the domestication and herding of animals.

Horticulture

The cultivation of plants for subsistence through nonintensive use of land and labor.

Agriculture

An intensive farming strategy for food production involving permanently cultivated land to create a surplus.

Industrial agriculture

Intensive farming practices involving mechanization and mass production of foodstuffs.

Reciprocity

The exchange of resources, goods, and services among people of relatively equal status to create and reinforce social ties

Redistribution

A form of exchange in which accumulated wealth is collected from the members of the group and reallocated in a different pattern.

Colonialism

The practice by which states extend political, economic, and military power beyond their own borders over an extended period of time to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets in other countries or regions.

Triangle trade

The extensive exchange of enslaved people, sugar, cotton, and furs between Europe, Africa, and the Americas that transformed economic, political, and social life on both sides of the Atlantic.

Industrial Revolution

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shift from agriculture and artisanal skill craft to machine-based manufacturing.

Modernization theories

Post–World War II economic theories that predicted that with the end of colonialism, less-developed countries would follow the same trajectory toward modernization as the industrialized countries.

Development

Post–World War II strategy of wealthy nations to spur global economic growth, alleviate poverty, and raise living standards through strategic investment in national economies of former colonies.

Dependency theory

A critique of modernization theory arguing that despite the end of colonialism, the underlying economic relations of the modern world economic system had not changed.

Neocolonialism

A continued pattern of unequal economic relations between former colonial states and former colonies despite the formal end of colonial political and military control.

Underdevelopment

The term used to suggest that poor countries are poor as a result of their relationship to an unbalanced global economic system.

Core countries

Industrialized former colonial states that dominate the world economic system.

Periphery countries

The least developed and least powerful nations; often exploited by the core countries as sources of raw materials, cheap labor, and markets.

Semiperiphery countries

Nations ranking in between core and periphery countries, with some attributes of the core countries but with less of a central role in the global economy.

Fordism

The dominant model of industrial production for much of the twentieth century, based on a social compact between labor, corporations, and government.

Flexible accumulation

The increasingly flexible strategies that corporations use to accumulate profits in an era of globalization, enabled by innovative communication and transportation technologies.

Neoliberalism

An economic and political worldview that sees the free market as the main mechanism for ensuring economic growth, with a severely restricted role for government.

Commodity

A good that can be bought, sold, or exchanged in a market.

Commodity chains

The hands an item passes through between producer and consumer.

Stratification

The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among members of a group or culture.

Class

A system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of a society's resources.

Bourgeoisie

Marxian term for the capitalist class that owns the means of production.

Means of production

The factories, machines, tools, raw materials, land, and financial capital needed to make things.

Capital

Any asset employed or capable of being deployed to produce wealth.

Proletariat

Marxian term for the class of laborers who own only their labor.

Prestige

The reputation, influence, and deference bestowed on certain people because of their membership in certain groups. 290

Life chances

An individual's opportunities to improve their quality of life and realize life goals.

Social mobility

The movement of one's class position upward or downward in stratified societies.

Social reproduction

The phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next.

Habitus

Bourdieu's term to describe the self-perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes developed in response to external influences over a lifetime that shape one's conceptions of the world and where one fits in it.

Cultural capital

The knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from parents and family that individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources in society.

Income

What people earn from work plus dividends and interest on investments along with earnings from rents and royalties.

Wealth

The total value of what someone owns, minus any debt.

Pushes and pulls

The forces that spur migration from the country of origin and draw immigrants to a particular new destination country.

Bridges and barriers

The factors that enable or inhibit migration.

Labor immigrants

Persons who move in search of a low-skill and low-wage jobs, often filling an economic niche that native-born workers will not fill.

Professional immigrants

Highly trained individuals who move to fill economic niches in a middle-class professions often marked by shortages in the receiving country.

Entrepreneurial immigrants

Persons who move to a new location to conduct trade and establish a business.

Refugees

Persons who have been forced to move beyond their national borders because of political or religious persecution, armed conflict, or disasters.

Know about the film Mardi Gras Made in China and what that example can tell us about the global economy.

Children work 14 hour days in mardi gras bead factories in China for 10cents an hour while New Orleans men and women exchange them for nudity and revelry in the French Quarter before thrpwing them away

How is today’s global economy reshaping migration?

People migrate for jobs.