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Biocultural explorations have advanced more than political ecology. For instance, investigations into culture’s role in creating and sustaining the placebo effect led to advances in theory regarding how healing works. Questions regarding the mechanisms whereby culture is embodied have enhanced our understanding of “stress.” Biologically oriented work has illuminated human–plant interaction, including regarding the microbiome and the antimicrobial value of certain herbs. Interest in trans-species or “human animal health” also has grown in recent years, as has our appreciation for multi-system interconnectivity.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, and medical anthropology matured, the subfield’s theoretical and methodological advances began informing and inspiring the larger discipline. General debates concerning culture, power, representation, social justice, and other issues increasingly reflected advances stemming from medical anthropology. This was seen in work on narrative or storytelling; identity creation and maintenance, and subjectivity and temporality (especially in relation to stigmatized physical and mental conditions); the role and impact of audit and surveillance systems and authoritative knowledge; health-care consumerism, pluralism, and syncretism; local and global health inequities; postcolonial trauma, and so on. Much of this work, it must be said (and see later), was influenced by extra-anthropological ideas, such as: Johan Galtung’s “structural violence” (1969, but see also Virchow 1985 [1848]), Michel Foucault’s “governmentality” and “biopower” (e.g., 1976) and, more recently, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “rhizomatic” perspective (1987), with the latter leading to an amplification of agency, desire, and potentiality, and indeterminacy in explorations of biopower. Another arena from which medical anthropology has strongly drawn of late (and added to) is Science and Technology Studies.