Yale University, United States.
Yale University, United States.
Soc Sci Med. 2018 Jan;196:233-239. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.10.033. Epub 2017 Oct 31.
Conceptually and methodologically, medical anthropology is well-positioned to support a "big-tent" research agenda on health and society. It fosters approaches to social and structural models of health and wellbeing in ways that are critically reflective, cross-cultural, people-centered, and transdisciplinary. In this review article, we showcase these four main characteristics of the field, as featured in Social Science & Medicine over the last fifty years, highlighting their relevance for an international and interdisciplinary readership. First, the practice of critical inquiry in ethnographies of health offers a deep appreciation of sociocultural viewpoints when recording and interpreting lived experiences and contested social worlds. Second, medical anthropology champions cross-cultural breadth: it makes explicit local understandings of health experiences across different settings, using a fine-grained, comparative approach to develop a stronger global platform for the analysis of health-related concerns. Third, in offering people-centered views of the world, anthropology extends the reach of critical enquiry to the lived experiences of hard-to-reach population groups, their structural vulnerabilities, and social agency. Finally, in developing research at the nexus of cultures, societies, biologies, and health, medical anthropologists generate new, transdisciplinary conversations on the body, mind, person, community, environment, prevention, and therapy. As featured in this journal, scholarly contributions in medical anthropology seek to debate human health and wellbeing from many angles, pushing forward methodology, social theory, and health-related practice.
从概念和方法论上讲，医学人类学非常适合支持关于健康和社会的“大帐篷”研究议程。它以批判性、跨文化、以人为本和跨学科的方式促进对健康和福利的社会和结构模型的研究方法。在这篇综述文章中，我们展示了该领域的这四个主要特征，这些特征在过去五十年的《社会科学与医学》中都有体现，强调了它们对国际和跨学科读者的相关性。首先，健康民族志中的批判性探究实践提供了对社会文化观点的深刻理解，在记录和解释生活经历和有争议的社会世界时。其次，医学人类学支持跨文化的广度：它明确了不同环境下对健康体验的本地理解，采用精细的、比较的方法为分析与健康相关的问题提供了一个更强有力的全球平台。第三，通过以人为本的世界观，人类学将批判性探究的范围扩展到难以接触到的人群的生活经历、他们的结构脆弱性和社会机构。最后，在文化、社会、生物和健康的交点上开展研究，医学人类学家就身体、思想、个人、社区、环境、预防和治疗等问题展开新的、跨学科的对话。正如本刊所展示的，医学人类学的学术贡献从多个角度探讨了人类的健康和福祉，推动了方法论、社会理论和与健康相关的实践。
