Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн

103 страница из 242

Panter-Brick and colleagues’ (2008) work in Afghanistan illustrates the sort of findings emerging from many zones of endemic conflict. Stressors are often unevenly felt in unpredictable ways. In contexts of war, political insecurity, and household and family vulnerability, they found that mental distress, prevalence of psychiatric disorders and biomarkers of stress (blood pressure and Epstein–Barr virus) were most prevalent among women and girls (i.e., significant gender differences were evident), but mapped more closely onto familial contexts and cultural prescriptions in Afghan society than to economic distress or exposure to war-related stressful events.

Even rarer has been biocultural engagement with historical trauma, which has emerged as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression of historical oppression of Indigenous people in North America and elsewhere (Kirmayer et al. 2014; Prussing 2014). Work on historical trauma argues that the collective trauma experienced by one generation can be transmitted to subsequent generations impacting health and well-being (Brave Heart and DeBruyn 1998; Conching and Thayer 2019; Gone 2013; Jernigan 2018; Mohatt et al. 2014 ). Conching and Thayer (2019) have reviewed biological pathways, including epigenetics, through which historical trauma can affect health. Jernigan (2018) links historical trauma, loss of land, food and cultural sovereignty, and current rates of obesity. Smith (2020) has recently explored colonial masculinities that were central to colonization in the past and to ongoing coloniality through both historical records and current genetic profiles among American Indians in the United States. In summary, social changes tend to magnify existing inequalities and exacerbate the health of the most vulnerable. Critical biocultural anthropologists are addressing these issues by employing a wide range of methods in varied settings.