How do Biological and Cultural Factors Shape our Bodily Experiences?

• Since the 1920s, anthropologists have explored the relationship between biology and culture. Nineteenth-century anthropologists such as E.B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan thought that biology could justify their views on non-Western people as “primitive.”

  • The popular idea was that culture was the dominant force in shaping who and what we were, but more recently, genetics have become the dominant explanation of personal possibility and constraint.

• Anthropologists ask questions about the importance of human biology compared with the effects of culture on individuals around the world.

  • Biocultural is the complex intersections of biological, psychological, and cultural processes—this allows anthropologists to think of human health as both biological and cultural.

• The human mind is one place to mend the divide between biology and culture.

  • External factors affecting health include social context and culture, with which the nervous system interacts through individual cognition.

• Studies of people with psychological problems across the globe have prompted questions about the occurrence of mental illness across cultures.

  • Culture-bond syndromes are mental illnesses unique to a culture, for example, koro, the belief that one’s genitalia or nipples are shrinking, in unique to Chinese and South Asian cultures.

  • Cultures also change what they consider mental disorders over time; for example, homosexuality was previously classified by psychiatrists as a mental disorder.

  • Correspondingly, treatment for mental illness varies cross-culturally. But, as a result of globalization, there have been a rise of common Western psychological conditions in places that previously had them.

• The biocultural approach allows anthropologists an understanding of the interplay of biology and culture.

  • For example, Rebecca Seligman’s biocultural study of mediumship in Candomble, a spirit-possession religion in Brazil, revealed that there is no single path to mediumship.

    • But the interaction of biological, psychological, and cultural factors play a crucial role. In other words, only a holistic study of mediumship reveals the complexities of mediumship.

What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

• We all have a subjective sense of what “health” and “illness” mean. Health is “freedom from disease.” Illness is the presence of sickness or disease.

  • But how optimally functioning does a person have to be to consider himself or herself healthy rather than ill? Are everyday aches and pains illnesses? Or can one remain “healthy” despite these things?

• It helps to employ the relativistic concept of sick role: the culturally defined agreement between patients and family members to acknowledge that the patient is legitimately sick.

• Medical anthropology is the subfield of anthropology that tries to understand how social, cultural, biological, and linguistic factors shape the health of human beings.

  • Anthropologists in this subfield, healthcare providers, and public health officials are all devoted to treating sickness and preventing the spread of disease. Medical anthropologists differ in their emphasis on illness and disease as culturally influenced subjective states.

• The individual acknowledgment of illness is incredibly variable. People without adequate healthcare in the United States literally “can’t afford” to be sick. Earl Koos’s 1940s study of American illness demonstrated this.

  • One respondent wanted a very specific definition of “sick.”

    • She described sometimes feeling so bad that she could “curl up and die” but was not “sick” because her family lacked money to visit a doctor and the kids needed care, concluding “most of us can’t be sick—even when we need to be.”

  • Others might have sufficient wealth to be “sick” often, seeking medical treatment for even the most minor ailments.

  • By almost any objective measure, someone who could “curl up and die” is ill. But this objective measure doesn’t necessarily translate into a personal perception of illness. Social expectations related to illness vary with class, gender, age, employment, and lifestyle.

  • People in poverty usually work more physically demanding jobs, eat less healthy food, and are less likely to seek medical care.

  • Environment and cultural expectations affect the perception of illness.

    • For example, in parts of Mali, infection rates of schistosomiasis, a liver and bladder infection caused by a parasitic worm that lives in water, are so high that it is not locally recognized as “illness.” Blood in the urine is a symptom experienced so frequently by adolescent males that they associate it with the transition to adulthood, not parasites.

    • Most Americans would run, not walk, to a doctor if they saw blood in their urine. The key point here is that people rarely worry about symptoms that are common in their community.

• When we explore cultural expressions of the “sick role,” it’s clear that different societies have different expectations of the sick person and people who interact with that person.

• Our “natural” behavior of staying home from work or school, in bed with chicken soup is a very specific social response to illness.

  • Anthropologist Robert Welsch contracted malaria while conducting fieldwork among the Ningerum people of Papua New Guinea. He then followed the American norm of medicine, fluids, seclusion, and rest.

  • Ningerum villagers had a very different perception of their sick role. Believing the illness to be caused by sorcery, they expressed concern and spent long hours with Welsch to comfort him and remove any suspicion that they were involved with the sorcery.

    • The more he tried to be by himself, the more they interpreted his behavior to mean that he was about to die.

• Contrary to the “stiff upper lip” mentality of many Westerners, the Ningerum are expected to demonstrate the severity of their symptoms as a call to action.

  • Americans would probably react more negatively than sympathetically to exaggerated fainting, bleeding, vomiting, shrieking, and smearing oneself with mud.

How and Why Do Doctors and Other Healthcare Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

• The cliche is that American parents want their kids to grow up to be doctors and lawyers. The prestige and social authority associated with the medical profession are relatively new.

  • In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctors had a limited ability to effectively heal patients and a lower social status.

• What social processes privileged the doctor’s perceptions over the patient’s throughout the twentieth century?

  • According to Paul Starr (1982), twentieth-century physicians in the United States used their status as professionals to increase their incomes, respect, and the exclusive right to determine medical treatments.

    • Organizations like the American Medical Association gave doctors greater control over training doctors of the future.

• But the wealth and respect of American doctors are not evident in most other countries’ medical communities.

• In many countries around the world, doctors and patients have very different views, with patients focusing on illness and doctors on disease.

  • Disease: the purely physiological condition of being sick, usually determined by a physician.

  • Illness: the psychological and social experience the patient has of a disease.

  • We explain the authority gap between doctors and patients in the following way:

    • The doctor’s view is the officially sanctioned one. Hospitals, governments, insurance providers, and courts recognize the diagnosis of the physician as legitimate.

    • The patient who actually has to live with the symptoms generally lacks any ability to authorize a prescription or treatment or even offer an official diagnosis.

  • Understanding the different perspectives of doctors and patients and the difference between disease and illness is a focus of medical anthropology.

  • In the 1950s and 1960s, anthropologists heavily favored Western medicine and assumed that interpretations of illness in the developing world were a result of ignorance.

  • Medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman explained that healers and patients often have different

    • Explanatory models of illness: explanations of what is happening to the patient’s body by the patient, by the patient’s family, or by a healthcare practitioner, each of whom may have a different model of what is happening.

      • Kleinman’s research demonstrates that considering both patient’s and doctor’s explanatory models of illness will likely result in the most effective medical solutions.

      • For example, the changing recommendations around breastfeeding and formula demonstrate the dynamism of medical knowledge, disease, treatment, and response.

  • How illness is defined depends on individual, cultural context, and time. Conditions that aren’t recognized as illness can become so through medicalization: the process of viewing or treating as a medical concern conditions that were not previously understood as medical problems.

• So how does a non-problem become a problem, or vice versa? For example, alcoholism:

  • Between the founding of the United States and the early twentieth century, excessive alcohol consumption was viewed as a sin or sign of weak character.

    • By the 1980s, American society, especially health insurance companies and healthcare providers, had begun to view it as a disease. (Consider the vast difference in social meaning between a “drunk” and a “person who suffers from alcoholism.”)

  • Three reasons have been suggested for increasing medicalization in the United States:

    • Financial: Everyone, from pharmaceutical companies to health insurers, is better situated to profit from treating disease than from treating “moral failings.”

    • Medical: Medicalization increases the social standing and authority of doctors.

    • Scientific: Given the unparalleled success of the scientific method, Americans are more comfortable seeking scientific solutions to social problems.

How Does Healing Happen?

• Our physical bodies heal, but healing itself is a complex biocultural process. Medical anthropologists recognize four distinct therapeutic processes: clinical processes, symbolic processes, social processes, and persuasion.

  • Clinical therapeutic process: the healing process in which medicines have some active ingredient that is assumed to address either the cause or the symptom of a disorder

  • Symbolic therapeutic process: a healing process that restructures the meanings of the symbols surrounding the illness, particularly during a ritual

  • Social support therapeutic process: a healing process that involves a patient’s social networks, especially close family members and friends, who typically surround the patient during an illness

  • Placebo effect: a healing process that works on persuading a patient that he or she has been given a powerful medicine, even though the “medicine” has no active chemical ingredient.

What Can Anthropology Contribute to Addressing Global Health Concerns?

• Anthropologists have always sought to understand cultural approaches to illness and healthcare systems. In recent years, they have increasingly made proactive efforts to improve healthcare in their research communities.

  • These themes, understanding and actively addressing global problems, are the focus of modern medical anthropology.

• In the 1950s, medical anthropologists assisted with an early attempt to reduce infant mortality in Latin America through public health programs. Their goal was to encourage rural peasants to receive vaccinations and other medical interventions at these clinics.

  • By the 1970s, the idea that global diseases could be eradicated by the year 2000 seemed justified. However, the emergence of new diseases like HIV and the reemergence of older ones created a continued need for medical anthropology.

• Non-Western civilizations like India, China, and the Arab would have had established medical systems for centuries. As these nations began to industrialize, they adopted many aspects of Western medicine. However, it supplemented local systems, rather than replacing them.

  • Most societies draw on multiple medical traditions simultaneously, a concept called pluralism: the co-existence and interpenetration of distinct medical traditions with different cultural roots in the same cultural community.

  • For example, Indian Ayurvedic practitioners diagnose health problems by reading the pulse and mixing the specific herbs together. Practitioners also use Sinhalese (referring to the people of Sri Lanka) medical ideas in a mediation of Ayurveda and local Sinhala medicine.

    • More recently, these practitioners have begun to include thermometers and standard Western medicines along with their herbal preparations.

  • In an increasingly globalized world, medical anthropologists emphasize that all medical systems are plural systems. These plural systems can be part of the solution to global health problems.

• Medical anthropologists play a role in understanding and preventing the spread of disease, including viral epidemics like HIV and Ebola.

  • For example, condom use has been relatively effective at preventing the spread of HIV in the United States and Europe but less so in sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, and Southeast Asia. In Africa, specifically, epidemiologists did not immediately recognize the patterns of transmission along trucking routes.

  • Anthropologists recorded people’s ideas about HIV, their explanatory models, and specific information about the sexual practices of women and men that helped reveal these patterns.

  • Anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer (1992) and Jim Yong Kim founded Partners in Health to holistically address social, economic, political, and health problems in Cange, Haiti.

    • Twenty years later, Cagne has nearly returned to its original lush environment, combined with major improvements in local health.

  • See “Anthropologist as Problem-Solver: Nancy Scheper-Hughes on an Engaged Anthropology of Health”

Key Terms

1. Biocultural - the complex intersections of biological, psychological, and cultural processes

2. Clinical therapeutic process - a healing process that involves the use of medicines that have some active ingredient that is assumed to address either the cause or the symptom of a disorder

3. Culture-bond syndrome - a mental illness unique to a culture

4. Disease - the purely physiological condition of being sick, usually determined by a physician

5. Explanatory model of illness - an explanation of what is happening to a patient’s body, by the patient, by the patient’s family, or by a healthcare practitioner, each of whom any have a different model of what is happening

6. Illness - the psychological and social experience a patient has of a disease

7. Medical pluralism - the coexistence and interpenetration of distinct medical traditions with different cultural roots in the same cultural community

8. Medicalization - the process of viewing or treating as a medical concern conditions that were not previously understood as medical problems

9. Mind - emergent qualities of consciousness and intellect that manifest themselves through thought, emotion, perception, will, and imagination

10. Placebo effect - a healing process that works on persuading a patient that he or she has been given a powerful medicine, even though the “medicine” has no active medicinal ingredient

11. Sick role - the culturally defined agreement between patients and family members to acknowledge that a patient is legitimately sick, which involves certain responsibilities and behaviors that caregivers expect of the sick

12. Social support therapeutic process - a healing process that involves a patient’s social networks, especially family members and friends, who typically surround the patient during an illness

13. Symbolic therapeutic process - a healing process that restructures the meanings of the symbols surrounding the illness, particularly during a ritual