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The Emergence of Critical Biocultural Approaches
Sobo (this volume) notes that medical anthropology has been dominated historically by two broad, contrasting perspectives: the symbolic/interpretive and the materialist, including a range of ecological and political economic perspectives. In the 1970s, as medical anthropology was growing as a defined subdiscipline of anthropology, bioculturally oriented medical anthropologists positioned themselves on the materialist side. Initially, they deployed ecological models that considered the interaction of host, pathogen, and environment (Armelagos et al. 1992). This ecological perspective was used to examine specific human–environment interactions where disease or other biological indicators of physiological perturbations (or stress) were evident. These causes of stress, the stressors, ranged from pathogens such as malaria to nutritional deficiency and psychosocial stressors. These early contributions clearly considered culture as part of the environment and took seriously how culture could buffer stressors or could be the source of stress.