Synopses & Reviews
These original essays, which combine theoretical argument with empirical observation, constitute a state-of-the-art platform for future research in medical anthropology. Ranging in time and locale, the essays are based on research in historical and cultural settings. The contributors accept the notion that all knowledge is socially and culturally constructed and examine the contexts in which that knowledge is produced and practiced in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology, and anthropology. Professionals in behavioral medicine, public health, and epidemiology as well as medical anthropologists will find their insights significant.
About the Author
Shirley Lindenbaum is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and author of Kuru Sorcery (1979). Margaret Lock is Professor of Medical Anthopology at McGill University and author of East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan (California, 1980).
Table of Contents
Traditional birth attendants in rural North India : the social organization of childbearing / Roger Jeffery and Patricia M. Jeffery -- Analysis of a dialogue on risks in childbirth : clinicians, epidemiologists, and Inuit women / Patricia A. Kaufert and John O'Neil -- Accounting for amniocentesis / Rayna Rapp -- "Learning medicine" : the constructing of medical knowledge at Harvard Medical School / Byron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good -- A description of how ideology shapes knowledge of a mental disorder (posttraumatic stress disorder) / Allan Young -- The shape of action : practice in public psychiatry / Lorna Amarasingham Rhodes -- Lay medical knowledge in an African context / Tola Olu Pearce -- Biomedical psychiatry as an object for a critical medical anthropology / Horacioa Fabrega, Jr.