Spurred by the United Nation's International Decade for Disabled Persons and medical anthropology's coming of age, anthropologists have recently begun to explore the effects of culture on the lives of the mentally and physically impaired. This major collection of essays both reframes disability in terms of social processes and offers for the first time a global, multicultural perspective on the subject. Using research undertaken in a wide variety of settings―from a longhouse in central Borneo to a community of Turkish immigrants in Stockholm―contributors explore the significance of mental, sensory, and motor impairments in light of fundamental, culturally determined assumptions about humanity and personhood.

Disability and Culture

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Whyte, Susan Reynolds

Ingstad, Benedicte

Diseases & Physical Ailments

University of California Press

The lives of many disabled people in Europe and North America have improved over the past two decades through innovative technologies and the efforts of the disability rights movement. These changes have been spreading to other societies around the globe―albeit unevenly. In this collection of essays, leading scholars explore global changes in disability awareness, technology, and policy from the viewpoint of disabled people and their families in a wide range of local contexts. The authors report on ethnographic research in Brazil, Uganda, Botswana, Somalia, Britain, Israel, China, Egypt, India, and Japan. They address the definition of disability, the new eugenics, human rights in local contexts, domestic and state citizenship of disabled people, and issues of identity and belonging.

Disability in Local and Global Worlds

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

This study of adversity and its social causes in rural Uganda considers how people deal with life's uncertainties--sickness, suffering, marital problems, failure, and death. Divination may identify causes of misfortune, ranging from ancestors and spirits to sorcerers. Sufferers and their families will then try out a variety of remedial measures, including pharmaceuticals, sorcery substances, and sacrifices. But remedies often fail, and doubt and uncertainty persist. The peril of AIDS can also be understood in terms of the existing pattern of uncertainty.

Questioning Misfortune

History

Africa

Cambridge University Press

This study of adversity and its social causes in rural Uganda considers how people deal with life's uncertainties--sickness, suffering, marital problems, failure, and death. Divination may identify causes of misfortune, ranging from ancestors and spirits to sorcerers. Sufferers and their families will then try out a variety of remedial measures, including pharmaceuticals, sorcery substances, and sacrifices. But remedies often fail, and doubt and uncertainty persist. The peril of AIDS can also be understood in terms of the existing pattern of uncertainty.

Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda (Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, Series Number 4)

The focus of this book is medicines (swallowed, injected, rubbed on), as understood by anthropologists concerned solely with their social uses. The text begins with examples of a mother medicating a child in various cultural contexts and ends with a broad review of the complex elements that determine the production and use of medicines. Since 1993, Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology has offered researchers and instructors monographs and edited collections of leading scholarship in one of the most lively and popular subfields of cultural and social anthropology. Beginning in 2002, the CSMA series presents theme booksworks that synthesize emerging scholarship from relatively new subfields or that reinterpret the literature of older ones. Designed as course material for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and for professionals in related areas (physicians, nurses, public health workers, and medical sociologists), these theme books will demonstrate how work in medical anthropology is carried out and convey the importance of a given topic for a wide variety of readers. About 160 pages in length, the theme books are not simply staid reviews of the literature. They are, instead, new ways of conceptualizing topics in medical anthropology that take advantage of current research and the growing edges of the field.

Social Lives of Medicines (Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, Series Number 10)

van der Geest, Sjaak

Hardon, Anita

Social Sciences

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Books by Whyte, Susan Reynolds