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Medical anthropological research in Australia
Lenore Manderson
Tropical Health Program, University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD
Abstract
The rapid expansion of medical anthropology has occurred as a consequence of increasing awareness in public health and medicine of the social, cultural and behavioural factors which interact with biology and which affect the risk, transmission and patterning of disease and the use and access of health services. Given this, the major thrust in the past decade has been the development of the discipline in applied research, often in response to specific program concerns. As a corollary of this push, whilst a core of anthropologists interested in health today, as a decade ago, are located within departments of anthropology and sociology, a growing number now work in faculties of medicine and other health research institutions.
Below I describe their research, drawing upon personal communication and some of their writings.' For pragmatic reasons these are grouped topically rather than theoretically. The paper provides a broad characterization of recent and current research in medical anthropology, but it is not an exhaustive inventory of it. Neither does it describe the fuller role of medical anthropologists: most are absorbed by other activities that include teaching, Australian and international consultative and professional activities, all of which draw substantially on their time, skills and energy.
The work of many anthropologists based in biomedical research and teaching settings might best be characterised as public health research, although as Sandy Gifford points out (pers. comm.), this includes both the anthropology of public health and anthropology in public health. Abby Bloom's work now as a full-time consultant in public health is exemplary of this latter trend. In general, however, medical anthropology includes a wide range of research interests concerned with social and cultural issues that impact upon health status, the social risks of infection and the spread of disease, cultural recognition of illness and the therapeutic strategies and management of perceived illness, features of folk and biomedical understandings of etiology, treatment and outcome of illness, and the interaction between these two spheres, and healing practices. The distinctiveness of medical anthropology from other health social sciences reflects in part the greater emphasis on qualitative research within anthropology (although it is neither true that anthropologists do only qualitative research nor that they are the only professionals using these methods and techniques), and in part the usual populations with whom anthropologists work in Australia and beyond. The distinction is partly due also to the theoretical base of research which derives from and speaks back to the parent discipline, and to the emphasis in much medical anthropology on cognitive systems and cultural models. The disciplinary boundaries of social science health research are by no means absolute, however, as the description which follows indicates
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