Some of the most innovative and provocative work on the emotions and illness is occurring in cross-cultural research on depression. Culture and Depression presents the work of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who examine the controversies, agreements, and conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of such research. A book of enormous depth and breadth of discussion, Culture and Depression enriches the cross-cultural study of emotions and mental illness and leads it in new directions. It commences with a historical study followed by a series of anthropological accounts that examine the problems that arise when depression is assessed in other cultures. This is a work of impressive scholarship which demonstrates that anthropological approaches to affect and illness raise central questions for psychiatry and psychology, and that cross-cultural studies of depression raise equally provocative questions for anthropology.

Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care) (Volume 16)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Kleinman, Arthur

Good, Byron J.

Mental Health

University of California Press

Chronic pain challenges the central tenet of biomedicine: that objective knowledge of the human body and mind is possible apart from subjective experience and social context. Sufferers, finding that chronic pain alters every aspect of life, often become frustrated and distrust a profession seemingly unable to explain or effectively treat their illness. The authors of this innovative volume offer an entirely different, ethnographic approach, searching out more effective ways to describe and analyze the human context of pain. How can we analyze a mode of experience that appears to the pain sufferer as an unmediated fact of the body and is yet so resistant to language? With case studies drawn from anthropological investigations of chronic pain sufferers and pain clinics in the northeastern United States, the authors explore the great divide between the culturally shaped language of suffering and the traditional language of medical and psychological theorizing. They argue that the representation of experience in local social worlds is a central challenge to the human sciences and to ethnographic writing, and that meeting that challenge is also crucial to the refiguring of pain in medical discourse and health policy debates. Anthropologists, scholars from the medical social sciences and humanities, and many general readers will be interested in Pain as Human Experience. In addition, behavioral medicine and pain specialists, psychiatrists, and primary care practitioners will find much that is relevant to their work in this book.

Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care) (Volume 31)

Politics & Social Sciences

Brodwin, Paul

Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio

Social Sciences

Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures)

Medicine supposedly offers a scientific account of the human body and of illness, and it follows that scientific medicine treats all forms of folk medicine as little more than superstitious practices. Professor Good argues that this impoverished perspective neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his own anthropological research in America and the Middle East, his analysis of illness and medicine explores the role of cultural factors in the experience of illness and the practice of medicine.

Cambridge University Press

A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities brings together articles from the key theoretical approaches in the field of medical anthropology as well as related science and technology studies. The editors’ comprehensive introductions evaluate the historical lineages of these approaches and their value in addressing critical problems associated with contemporary forms of illness experience and health care. <ul>
<li>Presents a key selection of both classic and new agenda-setting articles in medical anthropology</li> <li>Provides analytic and historical contextual introductions by leading figures in medical anthropology, medical sociology, and science and technology studies</li> <li>Critically reviews the contribution of medical anthropology to a new global health movement that is reshaping international health agendas</li> </ul>

A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities (Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Anthropology

Wiley/Blackwell

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