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Social Change, Conflicts, and Health A deeper appreciation of history and global political-economic processes makes clear that humans are invariably in transition – be it a food production shift from foraging to food production, from colonization, or from insertion into global capitalism. Armelagos and colleagues (2005) framed the major shifts in political economies and ecologies across human history in terms of epidemiological transitions in disease patterns resulting from evolutionary, historical, and political-economic processes associated with social change. Biocultural anthropologists interested in the health consequences of these transitions have addressed shifts from foraging to food production (Armelagos and Cohen 1984; Goodman 1998), the demographic devastation and subsequent long-term health consequences of conquest and colonization (Santos and Coimbra 1998), and the more recent transitions into market economies (Leatherman 1996: Leonard and Godoy 2008).

In assessing the first transition from foraging to farmer, Goodman (1998) argues that political hierarchies and resource extraction from the peripheries to the center of precapitalist social formations played a key role in declining health in rural areas. Such global-local processes are evident in both conquest and colonization, which had obvious health impacts through transmission of new diseases into previously unexposed populations, and the exploitation of environmental resources and labor.