当代医学人类学理论:持续、变革与发展

Contemporary Theory in Medical Anthropology:Continuity,Transformation and Growth

概述了医学人类学作为一种应用理论所赖以确立的历史语境。着重强调了两个主要的理论分支:非西方医学和西医文化。(1)陈述了疾病的成因,医学用于社会控制的政治功能,医治者在非西方医学体制下的文化角色。(2)强调当今的主题是应该把西医当作一个文化系统来研究。进一步讨论了当今的理论应该如何指导研究者去应用医学人类学的专门技能进行针对全球疾病的可持续性防治,比如艾滋病和肺结核。重点在于解释该理论的主要原理,包括治疗过程、健康公平性、健康和疾病的社会结构以及对健康和治疗的跨文化研究。

As an organized subfield of anthropology, medical anthropology emerged in the late 1940s as an effort to link the anthropological studies of ethnomedicine, intemational public health movement, and anthropology of development. The article is organized into three parts. I begin by sketching out the historical context in which medical anthropology became established as an applied discipline with a sizeable body of theory. Then, I concentrate on the two major disciplinary emphases： non-westem medicine and westem biomedicine. In the first, I address the issues related to the attribution of sickness, the political use of medicine for social control, and the cultural role of healers and patients in non-westem medical systems. In the second, I focus on the current theme that western biomedicine needs to be studied as a cultural system. Finally, looking beyond academia, T discuss how the current theories guided researchers to apply medical anthropological expertise in sustainable prevention of global diseases, such as AIDS and tuberculosis. Primary emphasis of the article is given to the principal concerns of the discipline, including the therapeutic process, health equity, social construction of health and sickness, and cross-cultural study of health and healing.