Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн

49 страница из 242

To some extent, the progressive climate fostered within numerous anthropology departments attracted newcomers to the field; some saw medical anthropology itself as a potential “social movement” (Stein 1980, p. 19). And while many went about their work systematically and with rigor, for others science was seen as “part of the military industrial complex” (D’Andrade 2000, p. 221) and therefore needed quashing: “Theoretically relevant description” gave way, in some circles, to “moral critique” (p. 222). Put off by this tendency where it arose, some scholars more committed to systematic and rigorous research inquiry than hortatory essay-writing switched their allegiance to other disciplines, such as epidemiology, genetics, biology, and even sociology.

Congruent with cultural anthropology’s general anti-science tendency at the time, a “bias in favor of alternative, heterodox, or non-Western forms of medicine” was noted by Melvin Konner (1991, p. 80). In his opinion, “Criticism of medicine has become a major academic and publishing industry” (p. 81; and see Ortner (2016) regarding “dark anthropology”). Admitting that “there is a lot that is wrong with medicine,” still he argued that the negative tone taken by some medical anthropologists toward biomedicine was counterproductive: “Modern medicine is not a conspiracy against humanitarianism,” he wrote; “Least of all is it a capitalist plot” (p. 81). The “high-minded criticism with no evidence of sympathy for the doctor’s plight” (p. 81) that he observed did do some damage to medical anthropology’s reputation in biomedicine – but not much, because generally such critiques were not published in media perused by biomedically affiliated professionals.