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Measuring Stress in Humans, by Ice and James (2007), provides an excellent overview of a wide range of uses in measuring stress, via catecholamines, cortisol, blood pressure, and immune function measurements. The “anthropological trick” is to not only bring these methods to the field but to connect these specific mechanisms to the larger ideological and political systems in which we live. For example, in the next section, we note that racist acts (as stress events) are specific and content dependent but are also connected in meaning and structure to broader historical and social system.

Dressler and coworkers (2014) developed a set of concepts and techniques for measuring the degree to which individuals share cultural models (cultural consensus) and are able to act on these models in daily life (cultural consonance) that have been applied to a number of biocultural health studies (see also Gravlee et al. 2005; McDade 2002; Tallman 2018). Among other applications, the degree to which lack of cultural consonance is linked to stress and health can help illuminate the consistent findings that link status hierarchies and income inequalities to health (Marmot 2017; Wilkinson and Pickett 2011).