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CHAPTER 3 Applied Medical Anthropology: Praxis, Pragmatics, Politics, and Promises
Robert T. Trotter, II
INTRODUCTION
Applied medical anthropology is a natural extension of basic anthropology theory and systematic qualitative methods focused on a practical exploration of the relationships between culture, society, health, healing, and the culturally created definitions of distress and disease, with the general pragmatic goal of deliberately improving health, healing, medicine, and the overall wellbeing of individuals, communities, cultures, and societies.
Applied medical anthropology has roots in the exploration of cultural differences in the common everyday experiences that shape peoples’ lives (c.f. Rylko-Bauer et al. 2006). While some areas of anthropological inquiry draw heavily on a relatively narrow range of theory and methods, applied medical anthropology tends to draw from all of the primary and secondary sources of anthropological theory. This empirical, and often eclectic or synergistic, approach commonly produces crucial links between different theoretical perspectives, methodological advances, and practical viewpoints within anthropology. It also challenges, supports, expands, and occasionally defeats theoretical paradigms from psychology, economics, political science, public health, epidemiology, and other parts of the biomedical and health research spectrum.
One of the consistently synergistic conditions that applies to medical anthropology in general, and applied medical anthropology in particular, is the impetus in many US universities to support the ideal of a synthesis of the theory and methods embodied in a four-field approach to anthropology (socio-cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, and archeology or prehistoric anthropology). Some US anthropology programs have stubbornly clung to the opportunity to maintain all four fields in their undergraduate and graduate programs, in the face of both intellectual challenges and the tendency to fragment into competing or more narrowly focused departments or programs. Medical anthropology has benefited from this stubbornness by producing individuals who are both comfortable and competent in multi-disciplinary, multi-theory, multi-sectoral, multi-focal projects and programs. This acknowledgement of the viability of a four-field approach has also enhanced participation by anthropologists in the emerging areas of “team science.”
Applied medical anthropology has been strongly impacted by external theoretical and methodological
