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As the 1980s ticked into place, anthropology – particularly cultural anthropology – began responding to changes in global and domestic power relations as well as to feel the heat of other disciplines’ critiques of traditional ethnographic methods: “The subjects of ethnography could no longer be constituted in as objective terms as previously” (Marcus 2005, p. 680). Definitions of culture, already in flux in the 1970s, grew increasingly “non-essentialist, fragmented, and [came to be] penetrated by complex world historical processes mediating the global and the local” (p. 681). The stage was set for the emergence of a critical form of medical anthropology – one that took the lessons of political economy to heart.

Even in the 1970s and earlier, some anthropologists had taken seriously the lessons of historical materialism encapsulated in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Eric Wolf’s contributions and subsequent changes in the political climate supported growth in this line of thinking, even in the USA, where earlier anti-communism had squelched it. In the UK and elsewhere, scholars such as Ronnie Frankenberg also drew on the work of Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. The focus on conflict and reconciliation and the tensions extant between (individual) agency and (social) structure, promoted earlier by Max Gluckman’s Manchester School, gained new ground.