This book aims to introduce nurses and other healthcare professionals to how anthropology can help them understand nursing as a profession and as a culture. Drawing on key anthropological concepts, the book facilitates the understanding and critical consideration of nursing practice, as seen across a wide range of health care contexts, and which impacts the delivery of appropriate care for service users. Considering the fields in which nurses work, the book argues that in order for nurses to optimize their roles as deliverers of patient care, they must not only engage with the realities of the cultural world of the patient, but also that of their own multi-professional cultural environment. The only book currently in the field on anthropology of nursing, this book will be a valuable resource for nursing students at all academic levels, especially where they can pursue specific modules in the subject, as well as those other students pursuing medical anthropology courses. As well as this, it will be an essential text for those post-graduate students who wish to consider alternative world views from anthropology and their application in nursing and healthcare, in addition to their undertaking ethnographic research to explore nursing in all its fields of practice.

This volume examines the biocultural dimensions of obesity from an anthropological perspective in an effort to broaden understanding of a growing public health concern. The United States of America currently has the highest rates of obesity among developed countries, with an alarming rise in prevalence in recent decades which promises to affect the nation for years to come. Bellisari helps students to grasp the complex nature of this obesity epidemic, demonstrating that it is the consequence of many interacting forces which range from individual genetic and physiological predispositions to national policies and American cultural beliefs and practices. As much a social problem as an individual one, the development of obesity is in fact encouraged by the pattern of high consumption and physical inactivity that is promoted by American economic, political, and ideological systems. With a range of up-to-date scientific and medical data, The Anthropology of Obesity in the United States provides students with a comprehensive picture of obesity, its multiple causes, and the need for society-wide action to address the issue.

Companion to Dental Anthropology presents a collection of original readings addressing all aspects and sub-disciplines of the field of dental anthropology from its origins and evolution through to the latest scientific research. * Represents the most comprehensive coverage of all sub-disciplines of dental anthropology available today * Features individual chapters written by experts in their specific area of dental research * Includes authors who also present results from their research through case studies or voiced opinions about their work * Offers extensive coverage of topics relating to dental evolution, morphometric variation, and pathology

This book describes how malaria both frustrates and facilitates life for Indigenous Pa lawan communities living in the forested foothills of the municipality of Bataraza on the island of Palawan in the Philippines. Tracing the arc of malaria on the archipelago from colonial encounters to the present day, it examines the ways in which malaria parasites have become entangled in contemporary lives. It uniquely explores the experiences of local government leaders working towards sustainably developing this last ecological frontier, health workers trying to meet international targets to eliminate malaria, and Pa lawan people trying to keep their bodies, social relations and the cosmos in careful balance. In exquisite detail, Dr Dalia Iskander shows how malaria emerged from, and was intrinsic to, a whole host of strategically-orientated social practices that were enacted in as well as around the disease's name, as people worked day-to-day to gain power in different guises in different arenas.

This book rejects traditional, dominant-typically reductive and anti-realist-explanations of stress, PTSD, and resilience. Frank Tortorello presents the United States Marine Corps' doctrinal explanation of stress, PTSD, and resilience as a case in point using new realist theoretical resources from Rom Harre and Charles R. Varela. The author systematically exposes the scientific and ethical failures of traditional explanations in accounting for the actions of stressed and resilient Marines on and off the battlefield. The power of new realist explanations emerges in application to the same ethnographic data, thereby supporting the author's call to replace traditional explanations with those grounded in new realism.

Native Americans, researchers increasingly worry, are disproportionately victims of epidemics and poor health because they "fail" to seek medical care, are "non-compliant" patients, or "lack immunity" enjoyed by the "mainstream" population. Challenging this dominant approach to indigenous health, Juliet McMullin shows how it masks more fundamental inequalities that become literally embodied in Native Americans, shifting blame from unequal social relations to biology, individual behavior, and cultural or personal deficiencies. Weaving a complex story of Native Hawai'ian health in its historical, political, and cultural context, she shows how traditional practices that integrated relationships of caring for the land, the body, and the ancestors are being revitalized both on the islands and in the indigenous diaspora. For the fields of medical anthropology, public health, nursing, epidemiology, and indigenous studies, McMullin's important book offers models for more effective and culturally appropriate approaches to building healthy communities.

For over twenty years, A History of Anthropological Theory has provided a strong foundation for understanding anthropological thinking, tracing how the discipline has evolved from its origins to the present day. The sixth edition of this important text offers substantial updates throughout, including more balanced coverage of the four fields of anthropology, an entirely new section on the Anthropocene, and significantly revised discussions of public anthropology, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. Written in accessible prose and enhanced with illustrations, key terms, and study questions in each section, this text remains essential reading for those interested in studying the history of anthropology. On its own or used with the companion volume, Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, sixth edition, this text provides comprehensive coverage in a flexible and easy-to-use format for teaching in the anthropology classroom.

As a biological, cultural, and social entity, the human fetus is a multifaceted subject which calls for equally diverse perspectives to fully understand. Anthropology of the Fetus seeks to achieve this by bringing together specialists in biological anthropology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. Contributors draw on research in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary sites in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America to explore the biological and cultural phenomenon of the fetus, raising methodological and theoretical concerns with the ultimate goal of developing a holistic anthropology of the fetus.

This book explores the interaction between anthropology and humanitarianism, focussed on the organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). The emphasis of the collection is on practising anthropology within humanitarian situations, reflecting on how anthropology contributes to the development of operational response. Each chapter presents an experience of working within a particular MSF project and highlights the real issues that anthropologists of humanitarian practice confront. The volume will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, development studies and global health, as well as to NGO staff and health professionals.

Affective Health and Masculinities in South Africa explores how different masculinities modulate substance use, interpersonal violence, suicidality, and AIDS as well as recovery cross-culturally. With a focus on three male protagonists living in very distinct urban areas of Cape Town, this comparative ethnography shows that men's struggles to become invulnerable increase vulnerability. Through an analysis of masculinities as social assemblages, the study shows how affective health problems are tied to modern individualism rather than African 'tradition' that has become a cliche in Eurocentric gender studies. Affective health is conceptualized as a balancing act between autonomy and connectivity that after colonialism and apartheid has become compromised through the imperative of self-reliance. This book provides a rare perspective on young men's vulnerability in everyday life that may affect the reader and spark discussion about how masculinities in relationships shape physical and psychological health. Moreover, it shows how men change in the face of distress in ways that may look different than global health and gender-transformative approaches envision. Thick descriptions of actual events over the life course make the study accessible to both graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences. Contributing to current debates on mental health and masculinity, this volume will be of interest to scholars from various disciplines including anthropology, gender studies, African studies, psychology, and global health.

This book aims to introduce nurses and other healthcare professionals to how anthropology can help them understand nursing as a profession and as a culture. Drawing on key anthropological concepts, the book facilitates the understanding and critical consideration of nursing practice, as seen across a wide range of health care contexts, and which impacts the delivery of appropriate care for service users. Considering the fields in which nurses work, the book argues that in order for nurses to optimize their roles as deliverers of patient care, they must not only engage with the realities of the cultural world of the patient, but also that of their own multi-professional cultural environment. The only book currently in the field on anthropology of nursing, this book will be a valuable resource for nursing students at all academic levels, especially where they can pursue specific modules in the subject, as well as those other students pursuing medical anthropology courses. As well as this, it will be an essential text for those post-graduate students who wish to consider alternative world views from anthropology and their application in nursing and healthcare, in addition to their undertaking ethnographic research to explore nursing in all its fields of practice.

Why people kill themselves remains an enduring and unanswered question. With a focus on Sri Lanka, a country that for several decades has reported 'epidemic' levels of suicidal behaviour, this book develops a unique perspective linking the causes and meanings of suicidal practices to social processes across moments, lifetimes and history. Extending anthropological approaches to practice, learning and agency, anthropologist Tom Widger draws from long-term fieldwork in a Sinhala Buddhist community to develop an ethnographic theory of suicide that foregrounds local knowledge and sets out a charter for prevention. The book highlights the motives of children and adults becoming suicidal and how certain gender, age, class relationships and violence are prone to give rise to suicidal responses. By linking these experiences to emotional states, it develops an ethnopsychiatric model of suicide rooted in social practice. Widger then goes on to examine how suicides are resolved at village and national levels, tracing the roots of interventions to the politics of colonial and post-colonial social welfare and health regimes. Exploring local accounts of suicide as both 'evidence' for the suicide epidemic and as an 'ethos' of suicidality shaping subjective worlds, Suicide in Sri Lanka shows how anthropological analysis can offer theoretical as well as policy insights. With the inclusion of straightforward summaries and implications for prevention at the end of each chapter, this book has relevance for specialists and non-specialists alike. It represents an important new contribution to South Asian Studies, Social Anthropology and Medical Anthropology, as well as to cross-cultural Suicidology.

Breastfeeding: New Anthropological Approaches unites sociocultural, biological, and archaeological anthropological scholarship to spark new conversations and research about breastfeeding. While breastfeeding has become the subject of intense debate in many settings, anthropological perspectives have played a limited role in these conversations. The present volume seeks to broaden discussions around breastfeeding by showcasing fresh insights gleaned from an array of theoretical and methodological approaches, which are grounded in the close study of people across the globe. Drawing on case studies and analyses of key issues in the field, the book highlights the power of anthropological research to illuminate the evolutionary, historical, biological, and sociocultural context of the complex, lived experience of breastfeeding. By bringing together researchers across three anthropological subfields, the volume seeks to produce transformative knowledge about human lactation, breastfeeding, and human milk. This book is a key resource for scholars of medical and biological anthropology, evolutionary biology, bioarchaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and human development. Lactation professionals and peer supporters, midwives, and others who support infant feeding will find the book an essential read.

Over the last two decades, attempts to control the problem of tuberculosis have become increasingly more complex, as countries adopt and adapt to evolving global TB strategies. Significant funding has also increased apace, diagnostic possibilities have evolved, and greater attention is being paid to developing broader health systems. Against this background, this book examines tuberculosis control through an anthropological lens. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from China, India, Nepal, South Africa, Romania, Brazil, Ghana and France, the volume considers: the relationship between global and national policies and their unintended effects; the emergence and impact of introducing new diagnostics; the reliance on and use of statistical numbers for representing tuberculosis, and the politics of this; the impact of the disease on health workers, as well as patients; the rise of drug-resistant forms; and issues of attempted control. Together, the examples showcase the value of an anthropological understanding to demonstrate the broader bio-political and social dimensions of tuberculosis and attempts to deal with it.

Winner of the Reader Views Literary Award, Societal Issues and the Reviewers Choice Best Non-fiction Book of the Year, Specialty Awards, Schooled on Fat explores how body image, social status, fat stigma and teasing, food consumption behaviors, and exercise practices intersect in the daily lives of adolescent girls and boys. Based on nine months of fieldwork at a high school located near Tucson, Arizona, the book draws on social, linguistic, and theoretical contexts to illustrate how teens navigate the fraught realities of body image within a high school culture that reinforced widespread beliefs about body size as a matter of personal responsibility while offering limited opportunity to exercise and an abundance of fattening junk foods. Taylor also traces policy efforts to illustrate where we are as a nation in addressing childhood obesity and offers practical strategies schools and parents can use to promote teen wellness. This book is ideal for courses on the body, fat studies, gender studies, language and culture, school culture and policy, public ethnography, deviance, and youth culture.

During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of "postgenomic" disciplines. The rise of epigenetics in particular signals a shift from notions of biological fixedness to ideas of plasticity and "impressionability" of biological material. This book investigates a long history of the beliefs about the plasticity of human biology, starting with ancient medicine, and analyses the biopolitical techniques required to govern such permeability. It looks at the emergence of the modern body of biomedicine as a necessary displacement or possibly reconfiguration of earlier plastic views. Finally, it analyses the returning of plasticity to contemporary postgenomic views and argues that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental management of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of potentialities. It is instead a plasticity that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community, with important implications for notions of risk, responsibility and intervention.

Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire presents the first analytical account in English of the history of subsistence crises and epidemic diseases in Late Antiquity. Based on a catalogue of all such events in the East Roman/Byzantine empire between 284 and 750, it gives an authoritative analysis of the causes, effects and internal mechanisms of these crises and incorporates modern medical and physiological data on epidemics and famines. Its interest is both in the history of medicine and the history of Late Antiquity, especially its social and demographic aspects. Stathakopoulos develops models of crises that apply not only to the society of the late Roman and early Byzantine world, but also to early modern and even contemporary societies in Africa or Asia. This study is therefore both a work of reference for information on particular events (e.g. the 6th-century Justinianic plague) and a comprehensive analysis of subsistence crises and epidemics as agents of historical causation. As such it makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate on Late Antiquity, bringing a fresh perspective to comment on the characteristic features that shaped this period and differentiate it from Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death worldwide today, but are not just a modern phenomenon. To explore the deep roots of CVDs in human history, this book, for the first time, brings together bioarchaeological evidence from different periods, as old as 5000 BC, and geographic locations from Alaska to Northern Africa. Experts in their fields showcase the powerful tool set available to bioarchaeology, which allows a more comprehensive reconstruction of the human past through evidence for disease. The tools include aDNA and histological analyses and digital imaging techniques for studying skeletal and mummified human remains. The insights gained from these studies are not only of value to historical research but also demonstrate how the science of archaeological human remains can provide the long view of the history of disease and contributes to modern biomedical research within the context of evolutionary medicine.

Psychiatric Encounters presents an intimate portrait of a public inpatient psychiatric facility in the Southeastern state of Yucatan, Mexico. The book explores the experiences of patients and psychiatrists as they navigate the challenges of public psychiatric care in Mexico. While international reports condemning conditions in Mexican psychiatric institutions abound, Psychiatric Encounters considers the large- and small-scale obstacles to quality care encountered by doctors and patients alike as they struggle to live and act like human beings under inhumane conditions. Beatriz Mireya Reyes-Foster closely examines the impact of the Mexican state's neoliberal health reforms on how patients access care and doctors perform their duties. Engaging with madness, modernity, and identity, Psychiatric Encounters considers the enduring role of colonialism in the context of Mexico's troubled contemporary mental health care institutions.

Evolution and Medicine provides an accessible introduction to the new field of evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary concepts help explain why we remain vulnerable to disease, how pathogens and cancer cells evolve, and how the diseases that affected our evolutionary ancestors have shaped our biology. The book interweaves the presentation of evolutionary principles with examples that illustrate how an evolutionary perspective enhances our understanding of disease. It discusses the theory of evolution by natural selection, the genetic basis of evolutionary change, evolutionary life history theory, and host-pathogen coevolution, and uses these concepts to provide new insights into diseases such as cystic fibrosis, cancer, sexually transmitted diseases, and malaria, incorporating the latest research in rapidly developing fields such as epigenetics and the study of the human microbiome. The book concludes with a discussion of the ways in which recent, culturally constructed changes in the human environment are increasing the prevalence of man-made diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, and are exacerbating socioeconomic disparities in health. Just as evolutionary biology is concerned with populations and with changes in populations over time, evolutionary medicine is concerned with the health of populations. Evolution and Medicine emphasizes the role of demographic processes in evolution and disease, and stresses the importance of improving population health as a strategy for improving the health of individuals. This accessible text is written primarily for physicians, biomedical scientists, and both premedical and medical students, and will appeal to all readers with a background or interest in medicine.

This book is supposed to be a warm thanks to all those who have supported the Austrian Ethnomedical Society (Osterreichische Ethnomedizinische Gesellschaft) in the last three decades and who have turned it into what it is today. The 29 authors of this volume have been connected to the Society and the Unit Ethnomedicine and International Health, Medical University of Vienna, in various ways. Apart from the guest professors John Janzen, Wolfgang Jilek, Ma Kanwen, Margaret Lock, Richard Ralston, Sjaak van der Geest and Zohara Yaniv, many other medical anthropologists have contributed to this volume. After giving an introduction to the history of the Austrian Ethnomedical Society and other ethnomedical institutions, a selection of theories and research topics in current medical anthropology and ethnopharmacology is presented. This book is also dedicated to Els van Dongen and Nina Etkin, two medical anthropologists of international format and guest lecturers at the Unit, who recently passed away.

This collection of articles reveals ritual to be a unique and powerful asset in healing trauma and broken relationships. Each contribution offers insights on how, in the face of uncertainty, threat and dislocation, human beings feel compelled to 'do something', usually with or for others, to alleviate their anxiety, fears and sense of powerlessness. The editor and authors demonstrate how the imaginative processes at the heart of ritualmaking contribute to self- and group regulation by healing and mitigating the negative impact of trauma on individuals, collective groups, and even global systems. The authors are a group of remarkable scholars, researchers and practitioners who represent a diverse range of disciplines and subfields, including archaeology, Chinese studies, digital culture, ecological science, philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, the politics of memory and the preservation of cultural heritage in wartime, ritual anthropology, social research, physics, research on traumatic stress, and peace studies. Students and researchers across the social and behavioural sciences will find this volume useful.

This book describes how malaria both frustrates and facilitates life for Indigenous Pa lawan communities living in the forested foothills of the municipality of Bataraza on the island of Palawan in the Philippines. Tracing the arc of malaria on the archipelago from colonial encounters to the present day, it examines the ways in which malaria parasites have become entangled in contemporary lives. It uniquely explores the experiences of local government leaders working towards sustainably developing this last ecological frontier, health workers trying to meet international targets to eliminate malaria, and Pa lawan people trying to keep their bodies, social relations and the cosmos in careful balance. In exquisite detail, Dr Dalia Iskander shows how malaria emerged from, and was intrinsic to, a whole host of strategically-orientated social practices that were enacted in as well as around the disease's name, as people worked day-to-day to gain power in different guises in different arenas.

This work focuses on the relationship between childhood socialization, masculinities, and young men's coming of age in contemporary Jamaica. The author elucidates social, cultural, and historical dimensions of young men's lifeworlds and theorizes on the potential trajectories of being emotionally well and/or un-well vis-a-vis gendered normative orders of growing up and relating to others within and beyond kinship and courtship relations. Based on fieldwork, this book elaborates on the extent to which social discourses of masculinity and men's personal experiences of their own and other men's mental health are reproduced in Jamaica. Faulhaber places her work in contemporary psychological and medical anthropology and aims to overcome the separation of psyche, body, and environment that is often common in psychotherapy, psychiatry, and health sciences. The author embarks on this important endeavour through critical and self-reflexive ethnography and the analysis of hegemonic narratives and discourses in media and popular culture. In juxtaposition and extension to other global mental health initiatives, this work highlights that well-being, affliction and suffering can barely be grasped scientifically as objectively measurable mental states of the individual.