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This definitional work occurred hand in hand with efforts to disassemble then-prevalent understandings regarding the nature of cultural systems. For instance, Arthur Kleinman’s 1978 contribution to the “What is Medical Anthropology?” conundrum accused his predecessors of reductionism. Kleinman denigrated the era of “sweeping comparative generalizations” and “ideal-type categorization,” which he painted as “superficial” and as couched at “too abstract a level to be relevant” (pp. 661–662). He argued instead for a medical anthropology that can “examine health and sickness beliefs as they are used in the usually exigent context of social action” (p. 661; emphasis in original). While the essay never said so explicitly, it in effect provided early support for a process-based theory of culture. It also questioned strongly “the tacit assumption… that medical systems are more or less homogenous, unchanging, and single” (p. 662).

More immediately, however, pointing to the importance of “microquestions” and adopting an anti-universalizing stance, the essay applauded the then-current growth of promising research using semantic network analysis methods. Referring particularly to the work of his Harvard colleague Byron Good, Kleinman lauded the study of sickness as “culturally constituted networks that link symbolic meanings to physiological and psychological processes and the personal experience of sickness, on the one side, and to social situations, relationships, and stressors on the other” and the circumvention of “biological language” that this allowed for (p. 663).

In short, rather than simply cataloging and classifying cultural practices, artifacts, and ideas (part of the archival tradition that did have its merits in anthropology’s early days), much work in this decade was devoted to identifying and understanding the various cultural forces within a given milieu that shape health and health-related experiences, ideas, and actions. And it wasn’t just semantic analyses that prospered. So did the meaning-centered approach to symbolic analysis, or what was to become known as the Geertzian tradition of interpretive anthropology. Also, a good deal of work (including Kleinman’s) took place through the study of illness narratives, using discourse analysis theories and methods and, later, phenomenology.

Anthropologists by this time had also come to understand, largely under the leadership of Charles Leslie, that highly elaborated medical traditions such as Ayurvedic, Unani, and Chinese medicine were dynamic, and porous, interacting with various local and global forces. The role of nationalism in keeping these “great traditions” of medicine vibrant also was theorized (see Leslie 1980). The general focus on how health-related experiences are shaped and expressed or given meaning locally was thus now complemented by efforts to examine how forces seen then as external to culture did the same.

Working in conditions of explicit change, first under the post-World War rubric of “development” and later as part of an acknowledged postcolonial transformation (see Marcus 2005), anthropologists increasingly studied, and created comparative frameworks for making sense of, health seeking, medical pluralism, and medical syncretism. Epistemological questions regarding evidentiary standards and modes of logic in medical decision-making were now raised more vociferously; theorists became concerned with the tendency to favor scientific or biomedical standards and the questions of legitimacy this can raise (Lock and Nichter 2002, pp. 4–5). New ideas about culture – and about neocolonial development and postcolonial existence – were given room to grow.