ABSTRACT
All societies strive to keep their members healthy, require explanations for when they become sick, and also need ways to diagnose and treat their ailments. The focus of this chapter is on how LAC peoples understand and cope with health and illness. In the first section I review key concepts in medical anthropology, including the distinction between ethnomedicine and biomedicine, and stress the usefulness of the perspective known as critical medical anthropology. I then turn to indicators of poverty, inequality, and ill-health. In the following two sections I center attention on contrasting ethnomedical and biomedical explanations for diseases, such as tuberculosis (TB), AIDS, and Zika and the folk illnesses of susto, mal de ojo, nervios, and grisi siknis. This is followed by an account of how healthy and unhealthy bodies echo social ties and expectations in the Andes, Amazonia, and the Caribbean. Health or ill-health never takes place in a political-economic vacuum, and in the next segment, I compare and contrast the US and Cuban health care systems. I end this chapter by appraising the health of migrant farmworkers, an important policy issue in the United States.
