1.
Describe three ways medical anthropologists engage with
communities and medical practitioners.
1) They seek to help medical practitioners understand why people are distrustful of
western doctors in some situations.
2) Help local populations understand that western medicine can be helpful and try to get
everybody get on the same page as to what definitions of health and wellness and well-
being can mean for certain communities.
3) They also acknowledge the potential differences in people's' definitions of disease,
illnesses, and suffering that may be thought or looked at differently by a community
compared to another.
2.
What are some of the reasons anthropologists give to support their
disapproval of the Human Terrain Team program?
Ethics Code Violations. I
nformation that anthropologists provide could used in a way
that could potentially result in the harming of people they interact with.
3.
In what way is medical anthropology biocultural?
It combines demography and epidemiology which are the study of human
populations and the study of how diseases spread through those populations.
4.
What is structural violence? How can it affect a person’s health?
How can structural violence affect a person’s agency?
Violence that results from the way that political and economic forces create a
higher risk for suffering within a population.
5.
What is medical pluralism?
The combination of cosmopolitan medicine and ethnomedical systems.
6.
Explain syndemics?
The combined effects on a population of more than one disease, the effects of
which are exacerbated by poor nutrition, social instability, violence or other
stressful environmental factors. The coronavirus is a current syndemic.
7.
What is embodied inequality? Provide an example.
The physical toll of inequality, a type of structural violence. One example is the
instance that poor women in Tanzania face death during childbirth at a rate of
1:23 time greater than women in “industrialized regions” who experience
obstetric mortality at a much lower rate of 1:4300.
