anth final terms

1. Politics 

• Politics refers to a diverse range of social practices through which people negotiate power relations. The practice of politics involves both the production and exercise of social relationships and the cultural construction of social meanings that support or undermine those relationships.

2. Disability rights movement 

• The problem is not with disabled people, the problem is with society that discriminates against disabled people

• Disability as an institutionalized source of oppression, comparable to inequalities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation

3. Models of Disability

• The social model: People are disabled by barriers (badly designed buildings, isolation, inaccessible transport)

• The medical model: people are disabled by medical conditions (can't hear or see, can’t walk, dependent)

 4. Medical anthropology 

• Uses a variety of analytical perspectives to examine the wide range of experiences and practices that humans associate with disease, illness, health, well-being, and the body - both today and in the past.

5. Medical ecology 

• The interaction of disease with the natural environment and human culture

6. Interpretivist approach in medical anthropology 

• Study health systems as a system of meaning

• How do humans across cultures make sense of health and illness? How do we think, talk, and feel about illness, pain, suffering, birth, and morality?

7. Critical medical anthropology 

• A branch of medical anthropology that analyzes the social, political, and economic factors that shape health, illness, and healthcare.

8. Interactive vs. Indifferent kinds 

• Interactive

  • Classifications that, when known by people or those around them, change the ways in which individuals experience themselves

  • The entity classified take up a stance or respond to the manner in which they’re classified

• Indifferent

  •  Classifications that do not affect what they classify

  • The entity or individual falling under the kind is indifferent to the categorization that, for lack of a better word, names the entity.

9. Idioms of distress 

• Patient’s description of mental illness

• Individual idioms situated in larger cultural discourse and orientations

10. Anthropology of Mental Distress

• Medical  anthropologists try to use neutral, open-ended language

11. Validity 

• A given classification possesses intrinsic unity - it is neither a random phenomenon nor an artifact of the techniques through which it is detected, treated, experienced, and studied

12. The “South Asia Puzzle” of Mental Health 

• There are higher proportions of people like Sita in India - and possibly non-Western countries more generally - than there are in the US and the West. Yet more people seem to recover spontaneously and more people (who never quite recover) hold down jobs and care for families more effectively

• Far more patients in developing countries experienced significantly longer periods of unimpaired functioning and complete clinical remission

13. Language and Culture 

• Language is a social action that does something in the world

  • It creates the world instead of just reflecting a pre-existing world

  • Involves the invention or performance of self/selves

14. Taboo language 

• Encodes or reflects social relationships, marks identity, or serves specific sociocultural functions

15. Language ideologies

• Attitudes, opinions, beliefs, or theories that we all have about language, which people are often unaware of 

16. Indexicality 

• Meaning and effect of language closely bound to context; meaning produced through contiguity or causality

17. Multifunctionality 

• Various types of functions that the language can perform

  • Through language, people accomplish much more than simply referring to or labeling items and events; instead, they convey emotions, display or hide attitudes, reinforce or sever social bonds, and talk about language itself

  • One word, many functions

18. Practice 

• Structure (both linguistic and social) simultaneously constrain and give rise to human actions, which in turn create, recreate, or reconfigure those same structures - and so on, with structures and actions successively giving rise to one another

19. Habitus 

• Self perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes develop in response to external influences over a lifetime that shape one’s conception of the world and where one fits into it

20. Linguistic Relativity 

• How our language is structured helps shape our thoughts and behavior (But this is not absolute)

21. Speech Community 

• Any human aggregate characterized by regular or frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregate by significant differences in language use

• All speech varieties in a speech community abide by a shared set of social norms, and compose a system of verbal behavior

22. Diaspora 

• The dispersion or spread of people from their original homeland

23. Heritage Tourism 

• Refers to experiencing and understanding cultural heritage, both past and present, through various means such as visiting historical sites, museums, archaeological sites, and participating in cultural events

24. 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 in both sides of the Atlantic

25. Commodification 

• The process of transforming inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects, services, ideas, nature, personal information), into commodities, or objects for sale

26. Self-devouring growth 

• The ways that the super-organism of human beings is consuming itself