Reading Questions

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”?