ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses key factors in the social and cultural origins, distribution, and differential consequence of infectious diseases. A focus on the social and cultural nature of health affirms the importance of understanding and treating infectious disease as much more than a biological or narrowly medical issue. The chapter directs our attention to the ultimate causes of much of the world's infection-related morbidity and mortality: the unequal structures of human social relationships across and within nations, typically in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other often-punishing social divisions. In other words, the chapter focuses on the political economic dimensions of the cultural and social factors in infectious disease health. It begins by contrasting what historian William McNeil, in a model that various anthropologists have adopted, termed the micro- and macroparasites of human societies, and moves on to examine the politicization of infection and infectious disease research, infections as stigmatizing diseases.
