Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн
89 страница из 242
CRITICAL BIOCULTURAL APPROACHES IN STUDIES OF HUMAN HEALTH
Critical biocultural anthropology approaches to health share many features with other areas of critical medical anthropology as well as social epidemiology (Krieger 2001), political ecology of health (Navarro 2004), critical perspectives in medical sociology (Annandale 2014), and critical health geography (Cutchin 2007). They all share an emphasis on inequalities, power relations, constrained agency, elucidating the pathways of embodiment that connect inequalities, biology, and health, and a critical examination of scientific inquiry. Yet, variations exist in these various critical approaches in terms of what processes are emphasized and what methods are foregrounded. For example, scholars more grounded in the social and cultural side of critical biocultural anthropology tend to produce deeper social analyses within a richer ethnographic grounding. They place much more emphasis on the individual and social experience of suffering, and privilege narratives as a way to bear witness to and make sense of affliction. In contrast, those with stronger roots in biological anthropology are more comfortable paying greater attention to evolutionary and ecological dynamics, to developmental plasticity, and to quantify the relationships between the social and the biological, as well as the specific pathways by which inequalities get under the skin (Goodman 2006; Hoke and Schell 2020). In this sense, they share much with social epidemiology’s efforts to quantify how social positions such as race, gender, and class are risk factors for disease, disability, and death, and pay greater attention to specific pathways of embodiment. What we see then are a set of approaches emerging from different disciplines and subdisciplines that share very similar goals of connecting history, political economy, and biology and health, yet that tend to emphasize different facets of complex biocultural interaction.