Key points
Ethnomedicine
Medical anthropology sits where germs meet meaning.
- Cross-cultural study of body, illness and healers: how people classify, prevent, treat.
- Disease vs illness: biomedical lesion vs lived meaning.
- Mary Beth Mills (Thailand): phallic house guardians against predatory ghost women — therapy as cosmology.
- Holistic healers work mind–body–spirit; compare with biomedicine’s strengths instead of sneering.
Disease
- Pathogen, lesion, lab
- Doctor’s category
Illness
- Pain, stigma, story
- Patient’s category
Thinker
Epidemiology and the body politic
- Surveillance, determinants, who is vulnerable (age, sex, work, place).
- Pastoral diet vs town cereals: infections, PEM, shorter stature — lifestyle change as epidemiology.
- Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: Brazilian mothers’ apparent detachment from doomed infants — political economy of scarcity, not ‘missing love’.
- Omran’s epidemiological transition: pestilence → receding pandemics → degenerative disease; a later ‘delayed degenerative’ phase is a teaching add-on.
- Paleolithic vs agrarian diets: energy balance, micronutrients, sodium/potassium, fat quality — diabetes and blood pressure as mismatch.
- Fetal undernutrition programmes a metabolism that fails in plenty (thrifty phenotype teaching).
Examples
- HIV: CCR5-Δ32 resistance; gendered coercion; needle-sharing outbreaks — name the host and the route.
- Leprosy: still a large global caseload in the notes — stigma is half the disease.
Key points
Nutrition
- PEM: kwashiorkor (protein, oedema) vs marasmus (energy, wasting).
- Audrey Richards among the Bemba: ‘lazy’ mine men were underfed; male migration left women with fields and a calorie gap.
- Caste, gender and class structure who eats protein — social epidemiology of nutrition.
WRAP Exams coaching notes for UPSC Anthropology optional. Pair with the official syllabus when you need every heading in order.