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More immediately, however, pointing to the importance of “microquestions” and adopting an anti-universalizing stance, the essay applauded the then-current growth of promising research using semantic network analysis methods. Referring particularly to the work of his Harvard colleague Byron Good, Kleinman lauded the study of sickness as “culturally constituted networks that link symbolic meanings to physiological and psychological processes and the personal experience of sickness, on the one side, and to social situations, relationships, and stressors on the other” and the circumvention of “biological language” that this allowed for (p. 663).

In short, rather than simply cataloging and classifying cultural practices, artifacts, and ideas (part of the archival tradition that did have its merits in anthropology’s early days), much work in this decade was devoted to identifying and understanding the various cultural forces within a given milieu that shape health and health-related experiences, ideas, and actions. And it wasn’t just semantic analyses that prospered. So did the meaning-centered approach to symbolic analysis, or what was to become known as the Geertzian tradition of interpretive anthropology. Also, a good deal of work (including Kleinman’s) took place through the study of illness narratives, using discourse analysis theories and methods and, later, phenomenology.