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That said, many today (Metzner and Warren included) advocate increased postcolonial perspective in the discipline, particularly when working in regions that have served as research laboratories for the Global North. Mvetumbo, Oware, Yotebieng, and Syvertsen further the call for decolonization, urging colleagues working in the Global South to reduce dependency on theory generated in and for the Global North – dependency supported not just by the latter’s intellectual hegemony but by related structural factors in the Global South that make it “a challenge knowing what other researchers in our own space or country are doing” (2020).

Most early medical anthropologists defined health (and most still do) as a broad construct, consisting of physical, psychological, and social well-being, including role functionality. What was novel in emerging medical anthropology, however, was a distinction increasingly drawn between “disease” – biomedically measurable lesions or anatomical or physiological irregularities – and “illness” – the culturally structured, personal experience of being unwell, which entails the experience of suffering.