Health and illness, care for others and oneself, and healing are fundamental human experiences, skills and practices. Different ways of nurturing bodily well-being, explaining ill-health, bodily care and healing have always been central to social anthropology, making medical anthropology its largest subdiscipline.
At the Department of Social Anthropology, we study diverse ways of creating and maintaining well-being, as well as of explaining and responding to ill-health – including supposedly “universalist” “bio-medicine” as well as other forms of caring for the body labelled, e.g., as “alternative” or “traditional” medicine, and how these relate to each other. We integrate such questions of body and health, illness and healing with other anthropological interests such as environmental harm, social and political-economic processes and historical change.
Importantly, matters of health and illness require that anthropology engages with medical and natural-scientific knowledge. The anthropology of body and well-being is thus interdisciplinary, learning from anthropological work on health and care for body and well-being has benefitted from neighbouring disciplines, including medical and environmental humanities, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Applying ethnographic methods and anthropological thinking to the making and use of scientific evidence and medical technology, STS has reshaped both theoretical thinking about the human body, care, diagnosis and treatment, and the methodologies deployed to study such issues. This applies to obviously “scientific” domains like hospitals, drug development, epidemiology, toxicology or vaccination; but has also re-shaped the way in which we study older themes in medical anthropology, such as nutrition, ritual, reproduction, divination or herbal medicine. We therefore consider the anthropological sub-fields of health, wellbeing and medicine, on the one hand, and of science and technology on the other, as intertwined areas of anthropological research.
Researchers working on Health and Science
Research projects within Health and Science
Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene
AnthEM: Medical and Environmental Anthropology for East Africa in the 21st-century
Epidemic Traces - What remains after epidemics have been controlled?