Next week (Sept. 4), we’ll meet at Library West for the first hour of class. We will start at the usual time (12:50 p.m.) in Library West, Room 212. Note that this is a slight change from the schedule I announced in class. Dr. Dan Reboussin will provide an overview of key library resources for researching and writing your term paper this semester. I expect to see you all there.
In our first meeting on Tuesday, I defined medical anthropology as the study of health and healing in cross-cultural and evolutionary perspective. How do others define the field?
On its website, the Society of Medical Anthropology offers an extended definition and identifies some topics that medical anthropologists work on. Here’s an excerpt:
Medical Anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that draws upon social, cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology to better understand those factors which influence health and well being (broadly defined), the experience and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of sickness, healing processes, the social relations of therapy management, and the cultural importance and utilization of pluralistic medical systems.
Read the full description on the SMA web page. How does it differ from the expectations about medical anthropology you had before enrolling in the class? What strikes you as different or similar about the way SMA defines the field and the way I presented it in class on Tuesday? Which of the topics listed on the SMA website excite you most? Any leads for your research paper?
Today’s New York Times has a short article about racial inequalities in exposure to tobacco advertising. The article is based on a new paper (PDF; subscription required) in Public Health Reports by Brian Primack and colleagues.
Among other things, Primack et al. identified five peer-reviewed studies that provided enough information to compute the density of tobacco advertisements by race. Pooling across these studies, Primack and colleagues found that there were 11.8 tobacco advertisements per 10,000 African American residents (95% CI 5.0-28.3), as compared to 4.5 per 10,000 white residents (95% CI 1.3-15.2). In other words, there were 2.6 times as many tobacco advertisements in predominantly black neighborhoods as there were in white ones. The confidence intervals on these estimates are large, mainly because one study of Boston neighborhoods observed a relatively small racial disparity. But even that study showed that tobacco advertisements are concentrated in predominantly poor, African American, and Latino neighborhoods.
This new paper by Primack and colleagues is important, because we know from other studies that smoking is the leading cause of disease burden in the United States. Primack and colleagues’ meta-analysis hints at how institutional racism shapes the distribution of disease in ways that people often overlook.
The PDF version of the syllabus has been updated to correct a couple of errors spotted by students. Thanks for paying close attention!
Welcome to the website for Culture and Medicine (ANT 4462) and Medical Anthropology (ANG 6737). To get started, I suggest you follow the links to the syllabus and course readings. Students registered for the course should have received an email with a username and password that provides access to PDFs of required readings. If not, please contact me. I encourage all students to subscribe to the RSS feed for the course. I’ll update the site frequently to let you know about relevant news and events, to share useful resources, and to stimulate your thinking about assigned readings and activities. I look forward to the semester!