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Critical biocultural anthropology, the focus of this chapter, falls within a bigger tent of biocultural approaches that encompass a broad range of contributions to medical anthropology, including foci on political economic, psychosocial, and evolutionary processes. Much of biocultural anthropology is an outgrowth of biological anthropology, and not all of these biocultural studies are critical in that they do not attend to social and political-economic processes and relations of power and inequality in their approach (i.e., the critical side of critical biocultural). This review specifically focuses on critical approaches in biocultural medical anthropology, perspectives that foreground power and inequalities, including the power and ideologies in biomedical research and clinical practices, and how inequalities shape conditions on the ground that lead directly to stress, pollution, nutrition, disease, and death.

These various approaches do not abandon ecological frameworks that long dominated biocultural anthropology, rather they attempt to integrate critical and political-economic perspectives with ecological frameworks. The goal of these efforts is not to reduce health and illness to biomedical terms and biological processes and mechanisms, but rather, to fully view human biology and health as inherently social and cultural. The question is not whether health is more biological or more cultural, but how human health processes are always both biological and cultural.