On Knowing and Not Knowing in the Anthropology of Medicine

✍ Scribed by Roland Littlewood (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 244
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Social scientific studies of medicine typically assume that systems of medical knowledge are uniform and consistent. But while anthropologists have long rejected the notion that cultures are discrete, bounded, and rule-drive entities, medical anthropology has been slower to develop alternative approaches to understanding cultures of health. This provocative volume considers the theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic implications of the fact that medical knowledge is frequently dynamic, incoherent, and contradictory, and that and our understanding of it is necessarily incomplete and partial. In diverse settings from indigenous cultures to Western medical industries, contributors consider such issues as how to define the boundaries of “medical” knowledge versus other kinds of knowledge; how to understand overlapping and shifting medical discourses; the medical profession’s need for anthropologists to produce “explanatory models”; the limits of the Western scientific method and the potential for methodological pluralism; constraints on fieldwork including violence and structural factors limiting access; and the subjectivity and interests of the researcher. On Knowing and Not Knowing in the Anthropology of Medicine will stimulate innovative thinking and productive debate for practitioners, researchers, and students in the social science of health and medicine.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction: Not Knowing about Medicine
1. The Importance of Knowing about not Knowing
2. Coconuts and Syphilis: An Essay in Overinterpretation
3. On “Medical System” and Questions in Fieldwork
4. Explanatory Models and Oversystematization in Medical Anthropology
5. The Ambivalence of Integrative Medicine
6. Not Knowing about Defecation
7. Christianity, Tradition, AIDS, and Pornography: Knowing Sex in Western Kenya
8. Feeling and Borderlinking in Yaka Healing Arts
9. On Knowing and not Knowing in Latvian Psychiatric Consultations
10. Farewell to Fieldwork? Constraints in Anthropological Research in Violent Situations
11. Neutralizing the Young: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Youth
12. In Touch without Touching: Islam and Healing
About the Contributors
Index