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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropology | 6/10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:09:55.121817+00:00 | kb-cron |
Medical anthropology is an interdisciplinary field that studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It is believed that William Caudell was the first to discover the field of medical anthropology. Currently, research in medical anthropology is one of the main areas of growth in anthropology as a whole. It focuses on the following six basic fields:
The development of systems of medical knowledge and medical care The patient-physician relationship The integration of alternative medical systems in culturally diverse environments The interaction of social, environmental, and biological factors that influence health and illness both in the individual and the community as a whole The critical analysis of interaction between psychiatric services and migrant populations ("critical ethnopsychiatry": Beneduce 2004, 2007) The impact of biomedicine and biomedical technologies in non-Western settings Other subjects that have become central to medical anthropology worldwide are violence and social suffering (Farmer, 1999, 2003; Beneduce, 2010), as well as other issues that involve physical and psychological harm and suffering that are not a result of illness. On the other hand, some fields intersect with medical anthropology in research methodology and theoretical production, such as cultural psychiatry, transcultural psychiatry, and ethnopsychiatry.
==== Nutritional ====
Nutritional anthropology is a synthetic concept that examines the interplay among economic systems, nutritional status, and food security, and how changes in the former affect the latter. If economic and environmental changes in a community affect access to food, food security, and dietary health, then this interplay between culture and biology is in turn connected to broader historical and economic trends associated with globalization. Nutritional status affects overall health, work performance potential, and the potential for economic development (whether in terms of human development or traditional Western models) for any given group of people.
==== Psychological ====
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group – with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories – shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes.
==== Cognitive ====
Cognitive anthropology seeks to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences (especially experimental psychology and evolutionary biology) often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge shapes how they perceive and relate to the world around them.
==== Transpersonal ====
Transpersonal anthropology studies the relationship between altered states of consciousness and culture. As with transpersonal psychology, the field is much concerned with altered states of consciousness (ASC) and transpersonal experience. However, the field differs from mainstream transpersonal psychology in taking more cognizance of cross-cultural issues – for instance, the roles of myth, ritual, diet, and text in evoking and interpreting extraordinary experiences.
=== Political and legal ===
==== Political ====
Political anthropology concerns the structure of political systems, viewed in light of the structure of societies. Political anthropology developed as a discipline concerned primarily with politics in stateless societies, a new development that started from the 1960s, and is still unfolding: anthropologists started increasingly to study more "complex" social settings in which the presence of states, bureaucracies, and markets entered both ethnographic accounts and analysis of local phenomena. The turn towards complex societies meant that political themes were taken up at two main levels. Firstly, anthropologists continued to study political organization and political phenomena that lay outside the state-regulated sphere (as in patron-client relations or tribal political organization). Secondly, anthropologists gradually began to develop a disciplinary concern with states and their institutions (and with the relationship between formal and informal political institutions). An anthropology of the state has developed into a thriving field today. Geertz's comparative work on "Negara", the Balinese state, is an early, famous example.
==== Legal ====
Legal anthropology or anthropology of law specializes in "the cross-cultural study of social ordering". Earlier legal anthropological research often focused more narrowly on conflict management, crime, sanctions, or formal regulation. More recent applications include issues such as human rights, legal pluralism, and political uprisings.
==== Public ====
Public anthropology was created by Robert Borofsky, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University, to "demonstrate the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to address problems beyond the discipline effectively – illuminating larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change".
=== Nature, science, and technology ===
==== Cyborg ====
Cyborg anthropology originated as a sub-focus group within the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in 1993. The sub-group was very closely related to STS and the Society for the Social Studies of Science. Donna Haraway's 1985 Cyborg Manifesto could be considered the founding document of cyborg anthropology, as it first explores the philosophical and sociological ramifications of the term. Cyborg anthropology studies humankind and its relations with the technological systems it has built, specifically modern systems that have reflexively shaped notions of what it means to be human.
==== Digital ====
Digital anthropology is the study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology and extends to various areas where anthropology and technology intersect. It is sometimes grouped with sociocultural anthropology, and sometimes considered part of material culture. The field is new and thus has a variety of names and emphases. These include techno-anthropology, digital ethnography, cyberanthropology, and virtual anthropology.
==== Ecological ====