ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the growing interest in multi-species entanglements as an opportunity to bring medical anthropology and environmental anthropology into deeper dialogue, through discussions of social justice that acknowledge the presence and absence of non-human animals in shared environments. It begins with an overview of medical anthropology, particularly as regards theories of disease, illness, sickness, and suffering. This overview highlights the fact that non-human species have not featured prominently in medical anthropology and that anthropologists interested in non-human animals have had little to say about disease or health. The chapter reviews parallel developments in geography. This review suggests that, by comparison with anthropology, conversations regarding non-human species are more advanced in that discipline. Finally, the chapter demonstrates the importance of multi-species interactions and ecologies for medical anthropology, by discussing some recent monographs that pivot on somewhat different conceptualizations of 'entanglement'.
