ABSTRACT

This reader looks at both the biological and cultural aspects of health and healing within a comparative framework.

Health and Healing in Comparative Perspective provides both fascinating comparative ethnographic detail and a theoretical framework for organizing and interpreting information about health. While there are many health-related fields represented in this book, its core discipline is medical anthropology and its main focus is the comparative approach. Cross-cultural comparison gives anthropological analysis breadth while the evolutionary time scale gives it depth. These two features have always been fundamental to anthropology and continue to distinguish it among the social sciences. A third feature is the in-depth knowledge of culture produced by anthropological methods such as participant-observation, involving long-term presence in and research among a study population. For medical anthropology, medical sociology, public health, nursing courses.

part I|132 pages

Healers and Healing Traditions

chapter 1|8 pages

Backing into the Future

chapter 10|10 pages

Distal Nursing

part II|138 pages

Biocultural Approaches

chapter 12|10 pages

Living at the Edge of Space

part III|174 pages

Culture-Oriented Approaches

chapter 28|15 pages

Breast Cancer: Reading the Omens

part IV|136 pages

Special Topics and Case Studies

chapter 42|9 pages

The Double Puzzle of Diabetes

chapter 44|8 pages

Eating Dirt

chapter 54|5 pages

The Cow Tipping Point