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During the tumultuous start of the second decade of the new millennium, continued police brutality directed against black men and the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed fault lines of power and inequality in the United States and across the globe. Inequities of life chances and access to basic resources such as housing, food, health care, transportation, and the Internet along axes that include race, class, and gender have been laid bare. Critically informed biocultural approaches in medical anthropology, ones that foreground the health consequences of power and inequalities, are one avenue toward a fuller understanding of how large-scale political-economic processes, including a global pandemic and racism in criminal justice, impact local-level lived realities and become embodied.

Biocultural approaches in medical anthropology have at times occupied center stage and at times have sat on the intellectual periphery. In the latter half of the twentieth century a “chasm” developed between biological and culture perspectives in anthropology, and this was nowhere more evident than in medical anthropology. Yet, there is no escaping that human health – the focus of medical anthropology – is quintessentially a biocultural phenomenon. The question ought not to be whether to engage with biology; rather, it ought to focus us on how biocultural approaches might best enhance our understanding of biology and health in political-economic and sociocultural contexts.