Skip to main content
-
anorexia nervosa
-
a culture-bound syndrome present in North American and European cultures, characterized by a person not eating to meet beauty standards.
-
authoritative knowledge
-
authority derived from perceived legitimacy, dependent on culture.
-
biocultural approach
-
the assumption that culture is informed by physical and sociocultural elements.
-
biomedicine
-
health care systems rooted in European and North American scientific knowledge.
-
Blue Zones
-
communities around the world with a high concentration of people near or over the age of 100.
-
causal attributions
-
a psychological concept used to study regular cultural behavior and how deviation from that behavior might be explained.
-
clinical observations
-
an ethnographic method resulting in a straightforward, clinical study of a medical situation.
-
comorbidities
-
two or more health conditions that often occur together.
-
critical medical anthropology (CMA)
-
a theory that highlights a culture’s inequalities, including inequalities in health care.
-
critical theories of health
-
an applied theory aimed at pointing out issues within health care systems and changing them for the better.
-
cultural concepts of distress (CCD)
-
a psychological term used to describe the way a culture experiences and expresses distress.
-
cultural systems model
-
a theory that that analyzes how systems within a particular culture, including health care systems, affect one’s worldview and actions.
-
disease
-
a biological agent that negatively affects health.
-
epigenetics
-
the changes in gene expression that take place during a person’s lifetime, often through environmental exposure.
-
ethnomedicine
-
a culture’s traditional knowledge and treatments for the management of health and illness.
-
evolutionary medicine
-
a method that uses evolutionary biology and culture to better understand human health.
-
health
-
a state of complete well-being.
-
health decision-making analysis
-
a study of the decisions that go into a person’s health choices.
-
idioms of distress
-
indirect ways that members of a culture show distress.
-
illness
-
a person’s experience of ill health, as defined by their culture.
-
illness narrative interviews
-
an ethnographic method used to collect information about an informant’s illness experience in their own words.
-
malady
-
a term encompassing disease, illness, and sickness.
-
medical ecology
-
a multidisciplinary theory studying the effects of environment on lifestyle and health.
-
medical pluralism
-
the use of both ethnomedicine and biomedicine.
-
medical statistics
-
statistics regarding treatments for medical illnesses that inform an anthropologist’s study, as well as medical policy and health choices.
-
participant observation
-
a methodology in which the anthropologist makes first-person observations while participating in a culture.
-
placebo effect
-
the effect in which belief in a treatment’s efficacy creates a positive health outcome.
-
political economic medical anthropology (PEMA)
-
a theory that highlights a culture’s inequalities, including inequality in health care.
-
political economy
-
the connection of economics and politics and how they affect wealth and inequality.
-
psychobiological dynamic of health
-
the measurable effect of human psychology on human biology.
-
sick roles
-
the social expectation of a person suffering from a sickness.
-
sickness
-
the cause of a person’s ill health that signifies to others how to treat that person socially.
-
social health
-
an acknowledgement that one’s social interactions and standing are an important aspect of overall health.
-
structural violence
-
violence caused by political and social systems that prevent groups from taking care of themselves in multiple ways.
-
susto
-
a cultural response to stress and trauma in Latinx communities.
-
symbolic approach
-
a theory focusing on how a culture’s symbols affect social and health outcomes.
-
symbolic interaction approach to health
-
and approach that focuses on the interaction between patient and caregiver(s).
-
syndemics
-
the social intersection of comorbidities in health outcomes.
-
traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)
-
traditional knowledge of one’s environment applied to the treatment of maladies.
-
voodoo death
-
death brought on by psychosomatic belief in cultural and environmental effects.