Now in its third edition, this textbook serves to frame understandings of health, health-related behavior, and health care in light of social and health inequality as well as structural violence. It also examines how the exercise of power in the health arena and in society overall impacts human health and well-being. Medical Anthropology and the World System: Critical Perspectives, Third Edition includes updated and expanded information on medical anthropology, resulting in an even more comprehensive resource for undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers worldwide. As in the previous versions of this text, the authors provide insights from the perspective of critical medical anthropology, a well-established theoretical viewpoint from which faculty, researchers, and students study medical anthropology. It addresses the nature and scope of medical anthropology; the biosocial and political ecological origins of disease, health inequities, and social suffering; and the nature of medical systems in indigenous and pre-capitalist state societies and modern societies. The third edition also includes new material on the relationship between climate change and health. Finally, this textbook explores health praxis and the struggle for a healthy world.

In this groundbreaking, global analysis of the relationship between climate change and human health, Hans Baer and Merrill Singer inventory and critically analyze the diversity of significant and sometimes devastating health implications of global warming. Using a range of theoretical tools from anthropology, medicine, and environmental sciences, they present ecosyndemics as a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between environmental change and disease. They also go beyond the traditional concept of disease to examine changes in subsistence and settlement patterns, land-use, and lifeways, throwing the sociopolitical and economic dimensions of climate change into stark relief. Revealing the systemic structures of inequality underlying global warming, they also issue a call to action, arguing that fundamental changes in the world system are essential to the mitigation of an array of emerging health crises link to anthropogenic climate and environmental change.

Learn the public health implications of shifting drug-related risks among the inner city poor Inner city drug use behavior shifts and changes, leaving past drug treatment programs, drug prevention efforts, health care provisions for drug users, and social service practice unprepared to effectively respond. New Drugs on the Street: Changing Inner City Patterns of Illicit Consumption tackles this problem by presenting the latest ethnographic and epidemiological studies of emerging and changing drug use behaviors in the inner city. This one-of-a-kind resource provides the latest research to help readers reconceptualize ways to think about today's drug use to more effectively address the growing problem. Unless public health and social service professionals keep in step with the shifting patterns of drug behaviors, drug use epidemics will inevitably unfold. New Drugs on the Street reveals the latest drug use practices of the poor in the inner city, with a concentration on the research in African-American and Latino populations. Each chapter gives an in-depth look at the use of various psychotropic drugs most recently gaining popularity, along with the surprising reemergence of PCP. The rampant use of ecstasy in the rave scene is explored, along with the effects of its heavy use, its after-effects, the likelihood of poly-drug mixing, and dangerous sex risk behaviors. Urban youth drug networking is examined in detail. The alarming use of embalming fluid mixtures is discussed, along with the disturbing public health implications of its use. The illicit use of narcotics analgesics (NA) like Vicodin and other pain killers is also explored, including the unclear association between NA use and Hepatitis C. A final chapter presents the latest information on Haitian youth and young adults in Miami, Florida, with ethnographic background to illustrate the reasons for drug use in this and other ethnic minorities. This valuable source is extensively referenced and includes several helpful tables to clarify research data. New Drugs on the Street examines: ecstasy diverted pharmaceutical painkillers PCP embalming fluid narcotics analgesics (NA) drug use dynamics the changing street drug scene new drug combinations new drug-involved populations New Drugs on the Street reveals the nature and direction of the latest drug use and is essential reading for health professionals in the health social sciences, public health, nursing, and substance abuse fields that deal with low income, ethnic minority, and inner city populations.

Features a collection of seven research-based articles on AIDS. This work seeks to cut through popular misunderstanding and conventional ideas about the spread and impact of AIDS by employing a political economic perspective in the analysis of the epidemic in diverse settings.

Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society, and just plain useless-culturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other people. Leading medical anthropologists Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page analyze media representations, drug policy, and underlying social structures to show what industries and social sectors benefit from the criminalization, demonization, and even popular glamorization of addicts. Synthesizing a broad range of key literature and advancing innovative arguments about the social construction of drug users and their role in contemporary society, this book is an important contribution to public health, medical anthropology, popular culture, and related fields.

Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society, and just plain uselessOCoculturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other people. Leading medical anthropologists Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page analyze media representations, drug policy, and underlying social structures to show what industries and social sectors benefit from the criminalization, demonization, and even popular glamorization of addicts. Synthesizing a broad range of key literature and advancing innovative arguments about the social construction of drug users and their role in contemporary society, this book is an important contribution to public health, medical anthropology, popular culture, and related fields."

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record and the third consecutive record-breaking year in planet temperatures. The following year was the hottest in a non-El Nino year. Of the seventeen hottest years ever recorded, sixteen have occurred since 2000, indicating the trend in climate change is toward an ever warmer Earth. However, climate change does not occur in a social vacuum; it reflects relations between social groups and forces us to contemplate the ways in which we think about and engage with the environment and each other. Employing the experience-near anthropological lens to consider human social life in an environmental context, this book examines the fateful global intersection of ongoing climate change and widening social inequality. Over the course of the volume, Singer argues that the social and economic precarity of poorer populations and communities-from villagers to the urban disadvantaged in both the global North and global South-is exacerbated by climate change, putting some people at considerably enhanced risk compared to their wealthier counterparts. Moreover, the book adopts and supports the argument that the key driver of global climatic and environmental change is the global economy controlled primarily by the world's upper class, which profits from a ceaseless engine of increased production for national middle classes who have been converted into constant consumers. Drawing on case studies from Alaska, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Haiti and Mali, Climate Change and Social Inequality will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change and climate science, environmental anthropology, medical ecology and the anthropology of global health.

Central to this volume, and critical to its unique creative significance and contribution, is the conceptual unification of syndemics and stigma. Syndemics theory is increasingly recognized in social science and medicine as a crucial framework for examining and addressing pathways of interaction between biological and social aspects of chronic and acute suffering in populations. While much research to date addresses known syndemics such as those involving HIV, diabetes, and mental illness, this book explores new directions just beginning to emerge in syndemics research - revealing what syndemics theory can illuminate about, for example the health consequences of socially pathologized pregnancy or infertility, when stigmatization of reproductive options or experiences affect women's health. In other chapters, newly identified syndemics affecting incarcerated or detained individuals are highlighted, demonstrating the physical, psychological, structural, and political-economic effects of stigmatizing legal frameworks on human health, through a syndemic lens. Elsewhere in the volume, scholars examine the stigma of poverty and how it affects both nutritional and oral health. The common thread across all chapters is linkages of social stigmatization, structural conditions, and how these societal forces drive biological and disease interactions affecting human health, in areas not previously explored through these lenses.

The chapters in Foundations of Biosocial Health: Stigma and Illness Interactions, drawn primarily from medical anthropology, highlight the diverse ways in which various stigmatized health conditions interact with social inequalities and stigma to form syndemics. The authors delineate multiple examples of stigma-driven syndemics to demonstrate both the nature of disease interactions and how stigma contributes to, promotes, exacerbates, or perpetuates a syndemic. In so doing, the authors also address how stigma translates from a social condition to various biological conditions. The authors' contributions cover a variety of topics, including HIV, substance use, obesity, depression, homelessness, poverty,and political oppression. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and public health.

In the contemporary world, war rivals infectious disease as a global cause of morbidity and mortality. Since the end of World War II, there have been at least 160 wars around the world with as many as 25 million (and probably many more) people killed, most of them civilians. Directly or indirectly, war touches the lives of most people on the planet, often with lasting and costly impact. Framed by the holistic and ethnographically grounded theoretical perspective of critical medical anthropology, and more broadly by the political economy of health, this book of essays by leading medical anthropologists and other health social scientists carefully examines the global effects of war, the war industry, and the international weapons trade on human health and well-being. Further, this book goes beyond offering a lively and readable account of a pressing health concern by critically analyzing the political and economic forces driving the war machine to inflict ever-increasing levels of social suffering and loss of life.

Killer Commodities enters the increasingly heated debate regarding consumer culture with a critical examination of the relationship between corporate production of goods for profit and for public health. This collection analyzes the nature and public health impact of a wide range of dangerous commercial products from around the world, and it addresses the question of how policies should be changed to better protect the public, workers, and the environment.

Killer Commodities enters the increasingly heated debate regarding consumer culture with a critical examination of the relationship between corporate production of goods for profit and for public health. This collection analyzes the nature and public health impact of a wide range of dangerous commercial products from around the world, and it addresses the question of how policies should be changed to better protect the public, workers, and the environment.

When Communities Assess their AIDS Epidemics is a detailed ethnographic description of the AIDS epidemic in ten U.S. cities and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Employing a rapid ethnographic assessment methodology, cities from the Atlantic to the Pacific have implemented Project RARE (Rapid Assessment, Response, and Evaluation) efforts. These RARE projects examine the moving edge of the AIDS epidemic through descriptions of high-risk sites and identifications of segments of the populations at greatest risk. Utilizing a series of focus groups and street interviews, local field research teams gain an insider's perspective on HIV risk within social contexts. Dr. Benjamin P. Bowser, Dr. Ernest Quimby, and Dr. Merrill Singer have compiled these critical studies that analyze current conditions, challenges, and recommendations encountered by RARE. When Communities Assess their AIDS Epidemics is a powerful and engaging text that will appeal to those interested in public health and anthropology.

When Communities Assess their AIDS Epidemics is a detailed ethnographic description of the AIDS epidemic in ten U.S. cities and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Employing a rapid ethnographic assessment methodology, cities from the Atlantic to the Pacific have implemented Project RARE (Rapid Assessment, Response, and Evaluation) efforts. These RARE projects examine the moving edge of the AIDS epidemic through descriptions of high-risk sites and identifications of segments of the populations at greatest risk. Utilizing a series of focus groups and street interviews, local field research teams gain an insider's perspective on HIV risk within social contexts. Dr. Benjamin P. Bowser, Dr. Ernest Quimby, and Dr. Merrill Singer have compiled these critical studies that analyze current conditions, challenges, and recommendations encountered by RARE. When Communities Assess their AIDS Epidemics is a powerful and engaging text that will appeal to those interested in public health and anthropology.

This new collection turns a critical anthropological eye on the nature of health policy internationally. The authors reveal that in light of prevailing social inequalities, health policies may intend to protect public health, but in fact they often represent significant structural threats to the health and well being of the poor, ethnic minorities, women, and other subordinate groups. The volume focuses on the 'anthropology of policy,' which is concerned with the process of decision-making, the influences on decision-makers, and the impact of policy on human lives. This collaboration will be a critical resource for researchers and practitioners in medical anthropology, applied anthropology, medical sociology, minority issues, public policy, and health care issues.

How do we understand and respond to the pressing health problems of modern society? Conventional practice focuses on the assessment and clinical treatment of immediate health issues presented by individual patients. In contrast, social medicine advocates an equal focus on the assessment and social treatment of underlying social conditions, such as environmental factors, structural violence, and social injustice. Social Justice and Medical Practice examines the practice of social medicine through extensive life history interviews with a physician practicing the approach in marginalized communities. It presents a case example of social medicine in action, demonstrating how such a practice can be successfully pursued within the context of the existing structure of twenty-first-century medicine. In examining the experience of a physician on the frontlines of reforming health care, the book critiques the restrictive nature of the dominant clinical model of medicine and argues for a radically expanded focus for modern-day medical practice. Social Justice and Medical Practice is a timely intervention at a time when even advanced health care systems are facing multiple crises. Lucidly written, it presents a striking alternative and is important reading for students and practitioners of medicine and anthropology, as well as policy makers.

This book synthesizes the flourishing field of anthropology of infectious disease in a critical, biocultural framework. Leading medical anthropologist Merrill Singer holistically unites the behaviors of microorganisms and the activities of complex social systems, showing how we exist with pathogenic agents of disease in a complex process of co-evolution. He also connects human diseases to larger ecosystems and various other species that are future sources of new human infections. Anthropology of Infectious Disease integrates and advances research in this growing, multifaceted area and offers an ideal supplement to courses in anthropology, public health, development studies, and related fields.

In this groundbreaking, global analysis of the relationship between climate change and human health, Hans Baer and Merrill Singer inventory and critically analyze the diversity of significant and sometimes devastating health implications of global warming. Using a range of theoretical tools from anthropology, medicine, and environmental sciences, they present ecosyndemics as a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between environmental change and disease. They also go beyond the traditional concept of disease to examine changes in subsistence and settlement patterns, land-use, and lifeways, throwing the sociopolitical and economic dimensions of climate change into stark relief. Revealing the systemic structures of inequality underlying global warming, they also issue a call to action, arguing that fundamental changes in the world system are essential to the mitigation of an array of emerging health crises link to anthropogenic climate and environmental change.

The third edition of Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action, provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical and health anthropology. The narrative is guided by unifying themes. First, health-oriented anthropologists are very involved in the process of helping, to varying degrees, to change the world around them through their work in applied projects, policy initiatives, and advocacy. Second, the authors present the fundamental importance of culture and social relationships in health and illness by demonstrating that illness and disease involve complex biosocial processes and that resolving them requires attention to a range of factors beyond biology. Third, through an examination of the issue of health inequality, this book underlines the need for an analysis that moves beyond cultural or even ecological models of health toward a comprehensive biosocial approach. Such an approach integrates biological, cultural, and social factors in building unified theoretical understandings of the origin of ill health, while contributing to the building of effective and equitable national health-care systems. NEW TO THIS EDITION All chapter have been updated or expanded. New Organization oThe former chapter 6, Health Disparity, Health Inequality, is now chapter 4 oThe former chapter 7, Health and the Environment: Toward a Healthier World, is now chapter 5 oThe former chapter 4, Ethnomedicine: The Worlds of Treatment and Healing, is now chapter 6 oThe former chapter 5, Plural Medical Systems: Complexity, Complementarity, and Conflict, is now chapter 7 oNEW: Chapter 8, The Biopolitics of Life: Biotechnology, Biocapital, and Bioethics

Learn the public health implications of shifting drug-related risks among the inner city poor Inner city drug use behavior shifts and changes, leaving past drug treatment programs, drug prevention efforts, health care provisions for drug users, and social service practice unprepared to effectively respond. New Drugs on the Street: Changing Inner City Patterns of Illicit Consumption tackles this problem by presenting the latest ethnographic and epidemiological studies of emerging and changing drug use behaviors in the inner city. This one-of-a-kind resource provides the latest research to help readers reconceptualize ways to think about today's drug use to more effectively address the growing problem. Unless public health and social service professionals keep in step with the shifting patterns of drug behaviors, drug use epidemics will inevitably unfold. New Drugs on the Street reveals the latest drug use practices of the poor in the inner city, with a concentration on the research in African-American and Latino populations. Each chapter gives an in-depth look at the use of various psychotropic drugs most recently gaining popularity, along with the surprising reemergence of PCP. The rampant use of ecstasy in the rave scene is explored, along with the effects of its heavy use, its after-effects, the likelihood of poly-drug mixing, and dangerous sex risk behaviors. Urban youth drug networking is examined in detail. The alarming use of embalming fluid mixtures is discussed, along with the disturbing public health implications of its use. The illicit use of narcotics analgesics (NA) like Vicodin and other pain killers is also explored, including the unclear association between NA use and Hepatitis C. A final chapter presents the latest information on Haitian youth and young adults in Miami, Florida, with ethnographic background to illustrate the reasons for drug use in this and other ethnic minorities. This valuable source is extensively referenced and includes several helpful tables to clarify research data. New Drugs on the Street examines: ecstasy diverted pharmaceutical painkillers PCP embalming fluid narcotics analgesics (NA) drug use dynamics the changing street drug scene new drug combinations new drug-involved populations New Drugs on the Street reveals the nature and direction of the latest drug use and is essential reading for health professionals in the health social sciences, public health, nursing, and substance abuse fields that deal with low income, ethnic minority, and inner city populations.

The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction and overview to the critical perspective as it has evolved in medical anthropology over the last ten years. Standing as an opposition approach to conventional medical anthropology, critical medical anthropology has emphasized the importance of political and economy forces, including the exercise of power, in shaping health, disease, illness experience, and health care.

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record and the third consecutive record-breaking year in planet temperatures. The following year was the hottest in a non-El Nino year. Of the seventeen hottest years ever recorded, sixteen have occurred since 2000, indicating the trend in climate change is toward an ever warmer Earth. However, climate change does not occur in a social vacuum; it reflects relations between social groups and forces us to contemplate the ways in which we think about and engage with the environment and each other. Employing the experience-near anthropological lens to consider human social life in an environmental context, this book examines the fateful global intersection of ongoing climate change and widening social inequality. Over the course of the volume, Singer argues that the social and economic precarity of poorer populations and communities-from villagers to the urban disadvantaged in both the global North and global South-is exacerbated by climate change, putting some people at considerably enhanced risk compared to their wealthier counterparts. Moreover, the book adopts and supports the argument that the key driver of global climatic and environmental change is the global economy controlled primarily by the world's upper class, which profits from a ceaseless engine of increased production for national middle classes who have been converted into constant consumers. Drawing on case studies from Alaska, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Haiti and Mali, Climate Change and Social Inequality will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change and climate science, environmental anthropology, medical ecology and the anthropology of global health.

This book explains the growing field of syndemic theory and research, a framework for the analysis and prevention of disease interactions that addresses underlying social and environmental causes. This perspective complements single-issue prevention strategies, which can be effective for discrete problems, but often are mismatched to the goal of protecting the public's health in its widest sense.

"Merrill Singer has astutely described why health problems should not be seen in isolation, but rather in the context of other diseases and the social and economic inequities that fuel them. An important read for public health and social scientists."
--Michael H. Merson, director, Duke Global Health Institute

"Not only does this book provide a persuasive theoretical biosocial model of syndemics, but it also illustrates the model with a wide variety of fascinating historical and contemporary examples."
--Peter J. Brown, professor of Anthropology and Global Health and director, Center for Health, Culture, and Society, Emory University

"The concept of syndemics is Singer's most important contribution to critical medical anthropology as it interfaces with an ecosocial approach to epidemiology."
--Mark Nichter, Regents Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona

"Merrill Singer offers the public the most comprehensive work ever written on this key area of research and policy making."
--Francisco I. Bastos, chairman of the graduate studies on epidemiology, Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz

"Exquisitely describes how this new approach is a critical tool that brings together veterinary, medical, and social sciences to solve emerging infectious and non-infectious diseases of today's world."
--Bonnie Buntain, MS, DVM, diplomate, American College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine

"For too long the great integrative perspectives on modern biomedicine and public health disease ecology and social medicine-have remained more or less separate. In this innovative and provocative book, Merrill Singer develops a valuable synthesis that will reshape the way we think about health and disease."
--Warwick H. Anderson, MD, PhD, professorial research fellow, Department of History and Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine, University of Sidney

This book synthesizes the flourishing field of anthropology of infectious disease in a critical, biocultural framework. Leading medical anthropologist Merrill Singer holistically unites the behaviors of microorganisms and the activities of complex social systems, showing how we exist with pathogenic agents of disease in a complex process of co-evolution. He also connects human diseases to larger ecosystems and various other species that are future sources of new human infections. Anthropology of Infectious Disease integrates and advances research in this growing, multifaceted area and offers an ideal supplement to courses in anthropology, public health, development studies, and related fields.

In addressing the urgent questions raised by climate change, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of climate change, guided by a critical political ecological framework. It examines the emergence and slow maturation of the anthropology of climate change, reviews the historic foundations for this work in the archaeology of climate change, and presents three alternative contemporary theoretical perspectives in the anthropology of climate change. This second edition is fully updated to include the most recent literature published since the first edition in 2014. It also examines a number of new topics, including an analysis of the 2014 American Anthropological Association's Global Climate Change Task Force report, a new case study on responses to climate change in developed societies, and reference to the stance of the Trump administration on climate change. Not only does this book provide a valuable overview of the field and the key literature, but it also gives researchers and students in Environmental Anthropology, Climate Change, Human Geography, Sociology, and Political Science a novel framework for understanding climate change that emphasizes human socioecological interactions.