Singer/Baer/Long/Pavlotski
Chapter 3
People, Places, Concepts and Questions
Terms, Places & People
Experiential health
Functional health
Health (WHO definition)
Disease
Illness
Placebo effect
Qi
Humoral theories of illness/disease
Sufferer experience
Social suffering
Cultural trauma
Cultural construction of disability
Recovery
Moral agency
Stigmatization
Discredited selves
Fat-stigma
Illness narrative
Restitution narrative
Chaos stories
Quest narrative
Graphic medicine
Embodiment
Biopower
Cultural capiutal
Somatic society
Immunology
Paradigm
Three bodies/mindful body approach (Lock and Scheper-Hughes)
Individual body
Social body
Body politic
Medicalization
Chronic fatigue syndrome
Idiom of distress
Questions
1. What do you make of the WHO definition of health and Singer/Baer/Long/Pavlotski’s comment that it is “somewhat utopian and akin to the notion of wellness associated with holistic health and the New Age movements”?
2. What is the difference between disease and illness?
3. How do humoral theories explain disease? What are some ethnographic examples of humoral theories of disease?
4. Do you think anthropologists have a moral responsibility to use medical anthropological knowledge to promote health as a human right and reduce suffering?
5. What is an illness narrative? What are the three types of illness narrative describe in the chapter, and what functions do they serve?
6. What are some of the ways medical anthropologists conceive and analyze the “body”?
