ABSTRACT
The intent of adopting a critical gaze is the jettisoning of dominant conception in the interest of a deepened perception, and the process that is never completed and demands constant referential reflexivity for three reasons. First is even critical understanding is historically and culturally rooted; second, the "inevitable conservatism of settled positions"; and third, without a fundamental reshaping of social relationships, even critical insight or action are subject to expropriation in the interest of the dominant class. Pivotal to the worldview of critical medical anthropology is recognition of class and related race and gender antagonisms as the defining characteristics of capitalist society and the reigning world-system. In its effort to introduce a more thorough-going critical perspective to the field, critical medical anthropology has found it necessary to question in whole or in part the utility of some of the dominant conceptions within conventional medical anthropology.
