One of the most influential and creative scholars in
medical anthropology takes stock of his recent
intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays.
Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who
has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since
1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary
background to propose alternative strategies for
thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social
and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the
border between medical and social problems, the boundary
between health and social change. Kleinman studies the
body as the mediator between individual and collective
experience, finding that many health problems--for
example the trauma of violence or depression in the
course of chronic pain--are less individual medical
problems than interpersonal experiences of social
suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to
moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the
infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it,
the social institutions relating to it, and the way it
is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in
various journals, these essays have been revised,
updated, and brought together with an introduction, an
essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic
stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the
contemporary ethnographic literature of medical
anthropology. |
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