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In this section we overview core themes in critical biocultural medical anthropology. Research projects and practitioners vary in the ways they emphasize (or do not) these themes in their work, and there are no hard rules or litmus test about whether a project is “critical.” We present these to provide a guide to common and core themes (see also, Goodman and Leatherman 1998; Leatherman and Goodman 2011).

Expanding Geographic and Historical Scopes The first fundamental theme of critical-biocultural approach is to expand the geographic and historical scope of analysis to examine how nations, communities, populations, and even viral pathways (Garrett 1994) are inextricably interconnected at regional, national, and global levels. Local environments and biologies are often the focus of research but themselves emerge from broader and deeper global histories.

Borrowing from Farmer’s (2004) outline for an anthropology of structural violence, these approaches aim to be “geographically broad” and “historically deep.” For example, the poor health of Haitian workers on Bateys associated with sugarcane estates in the Dominican Republic is clearly linked to conditions of abject poverty, limited occupational opportunities, unhygienic environments, and limited access to health care (Simmons 2002). These conditions are not just unfortunate realities but products of a history of colonialism in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, conflicts between Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the nineteenth century, and more recent human rights and migration policies that deny equal rights and access to resources to Haitian workers (Farmer 2004; Martinez 1995; Mintz 1985; Simmons 2002). In Europe and the People Without History, Eric Wolf (1982) opened up the view of closed eco-cultural systems and recontextualized “people without history” within historical and larger political economic processes. A critical biocultural medical anthropology aims to extend this recontextualization to processes under the skin, bodies, and human biologies.