In this review, we trace the origins and dissemination of syndemics, a concept developed within critical medical anthropology that rapidly diffused to other fields. The goal is to provide a review of ...the literature, with a focus on key debates. After a brief discussion of the nature and significance of syndemic theory and its applications, we trace the history and development of the syndemic framework within anthropology and the contributions of anthropologists who use it. We also look beyond anthropology to the adoption and use of syndemics in other health-related disciplines, including biomedicine, nursing, public health, and psychology, and discuss controversies in syndemics, particularly the perception that existing syndemics research focuses on methodologies at the individual level rather than at the population level and fails to provide evidence of synergistic interactions. Finally, we discuss emerging syndemics research on COVID-19 and provide an overview of the application of syndemics research.
Why do humans heal one another? Evolutionary psychology has advanced our understanding of why humans suffer psychological distress and mental illness. However, to date, the evolutionary origins of ...what drives humans to alleviate the suffering of others has received limited attention. Therefore, we draw upon evolutionary theory to assess why humans psychologically support one another, focusing on the interpersonal regulation of emotions that shapes how humans heal and console one another when in psychosocial distress. To understand why we engage in psychological healing, we review the evolution of cooperation among social species and the roles of emotional contagion, empathy, and self-regulation. We discuss key aspects of human biocultural evolution that have contributed to healing behaviors: symbolic logic including language, complex social networks, and the long period of childhood that necessitates identifying and responding to others in distress. However, both biological and cultural evolution also have led to social context when empathy and consoling are impeded. Ultimately, by understanding the evolutionary processes shaping why humans psychologically do or do not heal one another, we can improve our current approaches in global mental health and uncover new opportunities to improve the treatment of mental illness across cultures and context around the world.
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•Understanding biocultural evolution of psychosocial healing helps improve current practice.•Psychological healing is a component of cooperative processes related to evolutionary fitness.•Social rupture and social repair are features of cooperative social species including humans.•Healing comprises empathy, mirroring, emotional contagion, self-regulation, and mentalizing.•Healing among humans involves symbolic processes requiring shared meanings of symbols.
Transnational Humanitarianism Ticktin, Miriam
Annual review of anthropology,
01/2014, Letnik:
43, Številka:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
This review traces anthropological studies of humanitarianism starting in the late 1980s, when humanitarianism began to take shape as a particular moral and political project through the formation of ...transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It follows both the evolving relationship of anthropologists to humanitarianism-initially as allies, then as critics, alternately embracing and challenging their conjoined humanist legacy-and the growing field of the anthropology of humanitarianism.
How functional medicine leverages systems biology and
epigenetic science to treat the microbiome and reverse chronic
disease. Each body is a system within a system-an ecology
within the larger ...context of social, political, economic, cultural,
and environmental factors. This is one of the lessons of
epigenetics, whereby structural inequalities are literally encoded
in our genes. But our ecological embeddedness extends beyond DNA,
for each body also teems with trillions of bacteria, yeast, and
fungi, all of them imprints of our individual milieus. Nested
Ecologies asks what it would mean to take seriously our
microbial being, given that our internal ecologies are shaped by
inequalities embedded in our physical and social environments.
Further, Rosalynn Vega argues that health practices focused on
patients' unique biology inadvertently reiterate systemic
inequities. In particular, functional medicine-which attempts to
heal chronic disease by leveraging epigenetic science and treating
individual microbiomes-reduces illness to problems of "lifestyle,"
principally diet, while neglecting the inability of poor people to
access nutrition. Functional medicine thus undermines its own
critique of the economics of health care. Drawing on novel digital
ethnographies and reflecting on her own experience of chronic
illness, Vega challenges us to rethink not only the determinants of
well-being but also what it is to be human.
Medical anthropologists working in interdisciplinary teams often articulate expertise with respect to ethnography. Yet increasingly, health scientists utilize ethnographic methods. Through a ...comparative review of health ethnographies, and autoethnographic observations from interdisciplinary research, we find that anthropological ethnographies and health science ethnographies are founded on different epistemic sensibilities. Differences center on temporalities of research, writing processes, sites of social intervention, uses of theory, and analytic processes. Understanding what distinguishes anthropological ethnography from health science ethnography enables medical anthropologists - who sometimes straddle these two ethnographic modes - to better articulate their epistemic positionality and facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations.
Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures puts historical disease concepts in cross-cultural perspective, investigating perceptions, constructions and experiences of health and illness ...from antiquity to the seventeenth century.Focusing on the systematisation and classification of illness in its multiple forms, manifestations and causes, this volume examines case studies ranging from popular concepts of illness through to specialist discourses on it. Using philological, historical and anthropological approaches, the contributions cover perspectives across time from East Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, spanning ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to Tibet and China. They aim to capture the multiplicity of disease concepts and medical traditions within specific societies, and to investigate the historical dynamics of stability and change linked to such concepts.Providing useful material for comparative research, the volume is a key resource for researchers studying the cultural conceptualisation of illness, including anthropologists, historians and classicists, among others.
Triangulating health Jackson, Paul; Neely, Abigail H.
Progress in human geography,
02/2015, Letnik:
39, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Calls for a political ecology of health have recently emerged in geography. This article builds on these to suggest a practice of a political ecology of health by incorporating the insights of ...medical anthropology, STS, and history of medicine. Framed around three perspectives – partial and situated knowledges, Marxist-feminist approaches, more-than-human geographies of health – this article argues that incorporating the insights of political ecology and cognate disciplines into the problems we investigate and the methods we use will make for a stronger practice of a political ecology of health.
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