Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health
Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health publishes research and theory in the field of medical anthropology. This field is broadly taken to include all inquiries into health, disease, illness, and sickness in human individuals and populations that are undertaken from the holistic and cross-cultural perspective distinctive of anthropology as a discipline -- that is, with an awareness of species' biological, cultural, linguistic, and historical uniformity and variation. It encompasses studies of ethnomedicine, epidemiology, maternal and child health, population, nutrition, human development in relation to health and disease, health-care providers and services, public health, health policy, and the language and speech of health and health care. The purpose of the journal is to stimulate debate on and development of ideas and methods in medical anthropology and to explore the relationships of medical anthropology to both health practice and the parent discipline of anthropology.
AnthroSource has MAQ and its predecessor, Medical Anthropology Newsletter. Coverage extends from 1972 through 2007.
MAQ and Medical Anthropology Newsletter are also indexed online at JSTOR. Coverage extends from 1983 to 1995.
Not receiving Medical Anthropology Quarterly? Contact AAA Member Services at members@aaanet.org.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 4: December 2007
articles
Healing Herbs and Dangerous Doctors: “Fruit Fever” and Community Conflicts with Biomedical Care in Northeast Thailand
Jen Pylypa
In Northeast Thailand, khai mak mai (fruit fever) is a local, ethnomedical category of illness identified by community members as untreatable by biomedical health providers. The illness is believed to be incompatible with several substances that may induce death, including fruit as well as two forms of medication associated with biomedical care: injections and intravenous solution. Consequently, fevers suspected of being khai mak mai are treated by herbalists while biomedical health services are avoided and feared. In this article, I examine local perceptions and treatment of khai mak mai. I also explore the context and consequences of concerns about the inadequacy of biomedical care, as well as the social meanings associated with the illness and the political-economic context that shapes both the meanings of, and everyday responses to, fevers suspected of being khai mak mai.
Critical Therapeutics: Cultural Politics and Clinical Reality in Two Eating Disorder Treatment Centers
Rebecca J. Lester
Recent studies suggest that eating disorders are increasing in Mexico and that this seems to correspond with Mexico's push to modernization. In this respect, Mexico exemplifies the acculturation hypothesis of eating disorders, namely, that anorexia and bulimia are culture-bound syndromes tied to postindustrial capitalist development and neoliberalist values, and that their appearance elsewhere is indicative of acculturation to those values. Available evidence for this claim, however, is often problematic. On the basis of five years of comparative fieldwork in eating disorder clinics in Mexico City and a small Midwestern city in the United States, I reframe this as an ethnographic question by examining how specific clinical practices at each site entangle global diagnostic categories with local social realities in ways that problematize existing epistemologies about culture and illness. In this regard, debates about acculturation and the global rise of eating disorders foreground issues of central epistemological and practical importance to contemporary medical anthropology more generally."Languages of Labor: Negotiating the “Real” and the Relational in Indo-Fijian Women's Expressions of Physical Pain"
Susanna Trnka
Medical personnel in public clinics in Fiji routinely contend that state-funded medical resources are misallocated on patients who complain of, but do not actually experience, physical pain. Frequently, these patients are identified as being Indo-Fijian women (i.e., women of South Asian origin in Fiji). In this article, I examine clinical interactions between medical staff and female Indo-Fijian patients to demonstrate how “real” and ‘unreal’ pain are distinguished in the clinical setting and to indicate some of the roles clinical encounters play in community processes that ascribe alternative meanings to physical pain. Focusing on how both physicians and women patients foster certain interpretations of physical pain over others, I argue that the category of ‘unreal’ pain, as employed by Fiji's physicians, consists of pain that medical professionals consider to be induced by psychological or physical, work-related stresses. I then show how Indo-Fijian women engage in a complementary but distinct discourse that emphasizes links between physical labor and pain and suggests that, in some cases, expressions of physical pain are as much an idiom of pride as an idiom of distress.
book reviews
Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Joseph Dumit.
Review by Victor Braitberg
Medicalized Masculinities. Dana Rosenfeld and Christopher A. Faircloth , eds.
Review by Gun Roos
Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self. Lesley Alexandra Sharp.
Review by Donald Joralemon
Menopause: A Biocultural Perspective. Lynette Leidy Sievert.
Review by Sylvia Kirchengast
Doing Health Anthropology: Research Methods for Community Assessment and Change. Christie W. Kiefer.
Review by Christopher McKevitt
Review by Hector Qirko