Medical Anthropology and the World System: Critical Perspectives

By Hans A. Baer, Merrill Singer, Ida Susser

Book Overview

Now in its third edition, this textbook serves to frame understandings of health, health-related behavior, and health care in light of social and health inequality as well as structural violence. It also examines how the exercise of power in the health arena and in society overall impacts human health and well-being.

Medical Anthropology and the World System: Critical Perspectives, Third Edition includes updated and expanded information on medical anthropology, resulting in an even more comprehensive resource for undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers worldwide.

As in the previous versions of this text, the authors provide insights from the perspective of critical medical anthropology, a well-established theoretical viewpoint from which faculty, researchers, and students study medical anthropology. It addresses the nature and scope of medical anthropology; the biosocial and political ecological origins of disease, health inequities, and social suffering; and the nature of medical systems in indigenous and pre-capitalist state societies and modern societies. The third edition also includes new material on the relationship between climate change and health. Finally, this textbook explores health praxis and the struggle for a healthy world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1440829152
• ISBN13: 9781440829154
• Release Date: May 2013
• Publisher: Praeger
• Length: 536 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 7 to 17 years

Customer Reviews

Very comprehensive, usually interesting read

As a nonacademic with a strong interest in medical anthropology, this book is exactly what I was looking for, a very broad, thorough overview of the subject, with ample history of the development of medical anthropology. It gave me many new perspectives from which to view disease and health issues. It even briefly covers aspects of New Age approaches to health. Very contemporary and up to date. Since it is written as an academic textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses, the layman will find some sections dragging, but overall very comprehensible and engaging.