Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology - Группа авторов - Страница 28

As the twentieth century drew to a close, and medical anthropology matured, the subfield’s theoretical and methodological advances began informing and inspiring the larger discipline. General debates concerning culture, power, representation, social justice, and other issues increasingly reflected advances stemming from medical anthropology. This was seen in work on narrative or storytelling; identity creation and maintenance, and subjectivity and temporality (especially in relation to stigmatized physical and mental conditions); the role and impact of audit and surveillance systems and authoritative knowledge; health-care consumerism, pluralism, and syncretism; local and global health inequities; postcolonial trauma, and so on. Much of this work, it must be said (and see later), was influenced by extra-anthropological ideas, such as: Johan Galtung’s “structural violence” (1969, but see also Virchow 1985 [1848]), Michel Foucault’s “governmentality” and “biopower” (e.g., 1976) and, more recently, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “rhizomatic” perspective (1987), with the latter leading to an amplification of agency, desire, and potentiality, and indeterminacy in explorations of biopower. Another arena from which medical anthropology has strongly drawn of late (and added to) is Science and Technology Studies.

The hope for generating generally relevant anthropological theories and concepts always has been there: As noted, some opposed medical anthropology’s instantiation as a subfield for fear that it might contribute unduly to the fragmentation of the field as well as to mute the subdiscipline’s ability to speak to pan-anthropological concerns. Yet, despite the persistent argument for medical anthropology’s relevance to “issues of interest to the discipline [as a whole, such as] culture contact, the acceptance of innovations, the organization of professional subcultures, and aspects of role theory among many others” (Colson and Selby 1974, p. 254) and despite exceptions to the rule, it was not really until the late 1980s and 1990s that such relevance was strongly seen. This marked medical anthropology’s emergence from the margin into the mainstream of the field (Johnson and Sargent 1990; see also Singer 1992a). More recent evidence of this has been the prevalence of health-related anthropology occurring outside of the subfield altogether, and of individuals not belonging to the SMA self-identifying as “medical” anthropologists.