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As a result, a newly “critical” perspective burgeoned. Proponents denounced past ignorance of political economic factors in medical anthropology. Systems thinking, most obviously in the form of world systems theory (as per Immanuel Wallerstein) and dependency theory (as per Andre Gunder Frank), was brought into play. Building on work done in the 1970s with regard to how “great traditions” (e.g., Ayurveda) do and do not respond to incursions from what some by now called “capitalist” or “cosmopolitan” medicine, medical anthropology in the 1980s confronted head-on the impact of hierarchical social relations on health knowledges, actions, and outcomes (see, for example, Baer et al. 1986; Singer 1986).

While interpretive medical anthropology focused on local symbolic significances and networks of meaning, taking ideas as key, critical medical anthropology (CMA) advocates prioritized the examination of power structures that underlay dominant cultural constructions, and questioned the ways in which power (including the power to frame “reality”) was deployed. In doing so, CMA sought (as it still does today) to expose local power dynamics and to reveal how outside interests – regional, national, global – affect local conditions. Furthermore, CMA showed (and shows) how health ideas and practices reinforce social inequality as well as expressing it.