Anth 147 Exam 1

Front 1

affective neutrality

Back 1

professionals expect to have a “detached concern for clients
we associate authority in this society with an unemotional persona
reinforces professional’s power and keeps clients from challenging them
such detachment helps deal with death and dying, with the pressure of making mistakes and with the uncertainty of medical knowledge
Medical students dealing with inappropriate feelings, i.e. autopsy, “intimate” contact with living bodies - Managing Emotions (Smith/Kleinman)

Front 2

Approaches within Medical Anthropology

Back 2

• Human health problems
• Healing systems in social/cultural/political/economic contexts
• Illness/healing embedded
• basic research on issues of health and healing systems
• applied research aimed at improving therapeutic care in clinical settings or improving public health programs in community settings
• Flueckiger studying Amma

Front 3

Atomism

Back 3

• From Naturalist Ontology
• The Principle of Atomism: Nature is compromised of discrete material essence
o Natural world consists of two parts: indivisible atoms and the void
o All parts of nature are autonomous “things-in-themselves”
o Nature is autonomous from human consciousness
o Nature is distinct from culture and human interpretation, nature is “given” and “out there,” distinct from the observer
o Matter is eternal, life is not
o Embodied in dichotomy between “objective” and “subjective”

Front 4

Biomedicine

Back 4

• Western medicine
• Biomedicine is cultural
• “Cured” to get back to normative state of pathology
• Western misconception that biomedicine is “almighty”
• Biomedicine built on philosophical foundations → look at observable characteristics in the overall illness experience
• Says symbolic harming and healing can’t occur

Front 5

Cause, responsible, and blame DISCOURSES

Back 5

• There are different kinds of explanations concerning how people acquire diseases.
• They imply different levels and ideas of personal responsibility, and thus carry with them different types of moral judgments about the ill or sick person.
• Cause discourse
o Morally neutral because it doesn’t involve human agency in illness/disease acquirement
o Ex - Alzheimer’s
• Responsibility discourse
o Holds individuals responsible for acquiring or increasing their chances for acquiring the disease
o Carries with it moral judgments about the person’s character, their weaknesses, and risky behaviors
o Ex - Lung Cancer
• Blame discourse
o Heightened version of “responsibility” discourse
o Holds the individual responsible, not only for acquiring the disease, but for putting others at risk
o Ex - HIV

Front 6

Contagious magic

Back 6

• A branch of sympathetic magic
• Based on the principle that things, once in contact, are permanently so, however separated physically they may subsequently become
• Affecting someone through something once physically connected to him or her (e.g. hair, nail clippings, footprint in the sand).
• Ex - Relics

Front 7

Cosmology

Back 7

• Ways of ordering the world
• In the context of the healing ritual
• Healing ritual creates a cosmology based on shared beliefs, or myths, about the world and the cosmos
• Beliefs do not have to be religious, but often take a stance on relationship between the religious and the secula0.r
• Naturalist cosmology
• With the Enlightenment, nature became disengaged from earlier metaphysical and spiritual connections
• Enlightenment thinkers posited a world that follows mechanistic laws instead of spiritual ones
• Nature as orderly and therefore predictable, follows a logical rather than spiritual order
• Shared cosmology
o The larger cultural presuppositions and beliefs that serve as the framework through which patients and healers meaningfully engage the ritual
o Can include religious/supernatural beliefs, but also encompasses a full range of social and moral conventions.

Front 8

CULTURE

Back 8

• An ongoing individual and collective process through which participants make meaning out of ordinary activities/conditions
• Dynamic source of knowledge/practice that underpins social action
• Continuously re-made, even if tends to be “conservative”
• Not a single variable, compromises multiple that affect all areas
• Inseparable from economic, political, religions, psychological, and biological conditions
• Look at cultural misconceptions

Front 9

Cultural construction

Back 9

• Cultural construction of illness
• Compromises multiple variables
• Connected to all aspects of society
• “Culturally-constructed”
o Reality is a structure of ideas/practices built by society through social interaction (formal and informal)
o Shaped by all factors of society
o We give meaning to things
o Ex - gender or beauty
o Doesn’t mean fabricated or incorrect
o Impacts how we dress, etc.
• “Illness is culturally-constructed”
• Culture constructs how members of society think/feel about a disease
o Particular moral/social meanings to make sense of disease/healing
o Ex - HIV/AIDS has a lot to do with apparent mode of transmission
o Ex - Alcoholism
o Taught about symptoms, names, symptoms, courses, causes, mitigation circumstances, cosmological and moral significance, and appropriate responses
o Taught etiologies (theories of causation) between sickness/disease
o Construct “bodies” as susceptible to disease in different ways
o See Arther Rubel pg. 43 “Epi of a Folk Illness”
o Personality system → State of health → Social system (triangle)
• Disease is also culturally-constructed
o With regard to etiology (theory of causation)
o Ex - Cholera
o Today: Bacterium
o 100 years ago: Poisonous air “miasma theory”
o Both cultural constructions

Front 10

Diagnosis

Back 10

• Understanding the act of diagnosis as performative emphasizes the ways illness/disease is often more than something one has - it is something a person comes to feel he or she is or may become. In this sense, diagnosis can be seen as a process of becoming.