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Biocultural research in the 1990s increasingly became oriented toward documenting biological compromise or dysfunction in impoverished environments (as opposed to adaptations) and the biological impacts of social and economic change (Thomas 1998). Social environments took precedence over physical environments, and measures of stressors expanded to include psychosocial stressors and their impact on health conditions such as hypertension and immune suppression (e.g., Blakey 1994; Dressler and Bindon 2000; Goodman et al. 1988; McDade 2002). Yet, while it became relatively common to associate biological variation with some aspect of socioeconomic variation, the context and roots of the socioeconomic variation were infrequently addressed. For example, research on “modernizing” populations documented how devastating such changes can be on human biology and health but provided little or no information about processes of modernization (Bindon 1997). The socioeconomic conditions, workloads, and environmental exposures that contribute to diminished health were conceptualized as natural and even inevitable aspects of changing environments, rather than contingent on history and social and economic relations.