دانلود رایگان مقاله زمینه انسان شناسی پزشکی در علوم اجتماعی و پزشکی

Abstract

Conceptually and methodologically, medical anthropology is well-positioned to support a “bigtent” research agenda on health and society. It fosters approaches to social and structural models of health and wellbeing in ways that are critically reflective, cross-cultural, people-centered, and transdisciplinary. In this review article, we showcase these four main characteristics of the field, as featured in Social Science & Medicine over the last fifty years, highlighting their relevance for an international and interdisciplinary readership. First, the practice of critical inquiry in ethnographies of health offers a deep appreciation of sociocultural viewpoints when recording and interpreting lived experiences and contested social worlds. Second, medical anthropology champions cross-cultural breadth: it makes explicit local understandings of health experiences across different settings, using a fine-grained, comparative approach to develop a stronger global platform for the analysis of health-related concerns. Third, in offering people-centered views of the world, anthropology extends the reach of critical enquiry to the lived experiences of hard-toreach population groups, their structural vulnerabilities, and social agency. Finally, in developing research at the nexus of cultures, societies, biologies, and health, medical anthropologists generate new, transdisciplinary conversations on the body, mind, person, community, environment, prevention, and therapy. As featured in this journal, scholarly contributions in medical anthropology seek to debate human health and wellbeing from many angles, pushing forward methodology, social theory, and health-related practice.

Conclusion

Medical anthropology is poised at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences, seeking to transform our understanding of “what matters” for people in terms of health and wellbeing. Embracing far-ranging interests, it generates in-depth knowledge about the ways people understand health and frame health-related decisions. It also provides a crosscultural, historical, and developmental lens on health in relation to the body and society. Scholars often ask which journal would be best suit their particular paper, and this is sometimes hard to determine (although perusal of one’s cited references usually suffices to provide a canny indication of intended readership). While the primary role of all editors is to assess quality and originality of scholarly work, we editors at Social Science & Medicine strive to encourage depth and interdisciplinary breadth of knowledge regarding pathways to health and wellbeing. As we reflect on the body of work published in this journal over the last fifty years, we find a strong, rich record of medical anthropology scholarship, one that pushes forward methodology, social theory, and health-related practice. An ongoing challenge is to bring conceptually and methodologically diverse bodies of work to bear on health practice and policy in a timely and effective manner.