Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine / Edition 1

by Arthur Kleinman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520209657
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/15/1997
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Arthur Kleinman is Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University, and Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology and Chair of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (California, 1980), Social Origins of Distress and Disease (1986), Rethinking Psychiatry (1988), and The Illness Narrative (1988); coauthor of World Mental Health (1995); and coeditor of Pain as Human Experience (California, 1992) and Culture and Depression (California, 1985).

Table of Contents

PREFACE    

1
Introduction: Medical Anthropology as Intellectual Career    

PART ONE: THE CULTURE OF BIOMEDICINE
2
What Is Specific to Biomedicine?    
3
Anthropology of Bioethics    
4
A Critique of Objectivity in International Health    

PART TWO: SUFFERING AS SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
5
Suffering and Its Professional Transformation:
Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal Experience
(with Joan Kleinman)    
6
Pain and Resistance: The Delegitimation and
Relegitimation of Local Worlds    
7
The Social Course of Epilepsy: Chronic Illness
as Social Experience in Interior China
(with Wen-zhi Wang, Shi-chuo Li, Xue-ming Cheng,
Xiu-ying Dai, ICun-tun Li, and Joan Kleinman)    
8
Violence, Culture, and the Politics of Trauma
(with Robert Desjarlais)    

PART THREE: THE STATE OF MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
9
The New Wave of Ethnographies in Medical Anthropology    

APPENDIX: WORKS BY ARTHUR KLEINMAN    
NOTES    
REFERENCES    
INDEX

Editorial Reviews

Kleinman (anthropology and social medicine, Harvard U.) has revised seven previously published essays and framed them with a new introduction and final chapter. Three explain the principles of what he calls a sociosomatic approach to medicine that considers the body as a mediator between individual and collective experience. The others apply the ideas to his work with the effects of China's Cultural Revolution, involuntary abortion, and other cases. The final chapter urges others to enter medical anthropology, where there is still plenty of elbow room. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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