Ch16 Exam Questions What Is Applied Anthropology?

Chapter 16: What is Applied Anthropology?

Test Bank

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 01]

1) According to medical anthropologists, a state of physical, emotional and mental well-being, together with an absence of disease or disability that would interfere with such well being, is called

Feedback: Health is a state of physical, emotional, and mental well-being, together with an absence of disease or disability that would interfere with such well-being.

Page reference: What Is Medical Anthropology?

a. health

b. biomedicine

c. wellness

d. positivism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 02]

2) Medical anthropologists refer to a suffering person’s own understanding of his or her distress as

Feedback: Illness refers to a suffering person’s own understanding of his or her distress.

Page reference: What Is Medical Anthropology?

a. health

b. sickness

c. illness

d. possession

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 03]

3) Sicknesses (and the therapies to relieve them) that are unique to a particular cultural group are called

Feedback: Culture-bound syndromes are sicknesses (and the therapies to relieve them) that are unique to a particular cultural group.

Page reference: What Is Medical Anthropology?

a. disease

b. suffering

c. illness

d. culture-bound syndromes

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 04]

4) The forms of physical, mental, or emotional distress experienced by individuals who may or may not subscribe to biomedical understandings of disease are called

Feedback: Suffering includes the forms of physical, mental, or emotional distress experienced by individuals who may or may not subscribe to biomedical understandings of disease.
Page reference: What Is Medical Anthropology?

a. sickness

b. suffering

c. illness

d. culture-bound syndromes

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 05]

5) Which of the following terms do medical anthropologists use to refer to Western forms of medical knowledge and practice based on biological science?

Feedback: Biomedicine refers to Western forms of medical knowledge and practice based on biological science.

Page reference: What Is Medical Anthropology?

a. disease

b. biomedicine

c. culture-bound syndromes

d. therapy

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 06]

6) The specialty of anthropology that concerns itself with human health—the factors that contribute to disease or illness and the ways that human populations deal with disease or illness, is called

Feedback: Medical anthropology is the specialty of anthropology that concerns itself with human health—the factors that contribute to disease or illness and the ways that human populations deal with disease or illness.

Page reference: What Is Medical Anthropology?

a. Biological anthropology

b. Physical anthropology

c. Medical anthropology

d. Positivist anthropology

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 07]

7) Human cultural practices influenced by natural selection on genes that affect human health are called

Feedback: Most evolutionary biologists tend to restrict their attention to biological adaptations: modifications of anatomical or physiological attributes of individual organisms, produced by natural selection, that better adjust organisms to the environmental settings in which they live. Medical anthropologists are particularly interested in cases where there is strong evidence that human cultural practices have influenced natural selection on genes that affect human health and hence must be understood as biocultural adaptations.
Page reference: What Makes Medical Anthropology “Biocultural”?

a. epidemics

b. syndemics

c. biocultural adaptations

d. genetic adaptations

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 08]

8) An adjustment by an organism (or group of organisms) that undermines the ability to cope with environmental challenges of various kinds is called

Feedback: Maladaptation is an adjustment by an organism (or group of organisms) that undermines the ability to cope with environmental challenges of various kinds.
Page reference: What Makes Medical Anthropology “Biocultural”?

a. a maladaptation

b. an adaptation

c. a syndemic

d. an epidemic

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 09]

9) Which of the following terms do anthropologists use to refer to the felt interior experience of the person that includes his or her positions in a field of relational power?

Feedback: Subjectivity refer to “The felt interior experience of the person that includes his or her positions in a field of relational power” (Das and Kleinman 2000).
Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

a. personality

b. self

c. subjectivity

d. mentality

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 10]

10) Which branch of medical anthropology emphasizes that cultural systems, including medical systems, are symbolic systems, and that people’s ideas and practices about sickness and health need to be situated in their own symbolic cultural contexts?

Feedback: One approach is interpretive medical anthropology, which is based on the anthropological view that culture mediates human experiences (including experiences of suffering). Interpretive medical anthropology emphasizes that cultural systems, including medical systems, are symbolic systems. This means that beliefs and practices about sickness and health held by people with different cultures could be better understood if they are situated in their own symbolic cultural contexts.

Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

a. demographic medical anthropology

b. evolutionary medical anthropology

c. interpretive medical anthropology

d. structural medical anthropology

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 11]

11) The coexistence of ethnomedical systems alongside cosmopolitan medicine is called

Feedback: Medical pluralism is the coexistence of ethnomedical systems alongside cosmopolitan medicine.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. biomedicine

b. medical pluralism

c. the social division of medicine

d. interpretive medical anthropology

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 12]

12) Alternative medical systems based on practices of local sociocultural groups are called

Feedback: Ethnomedical systems refers to alternative medical systems based on practices of local sociocultural groups.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. biomedicine

b. superstition

c. ethnomedical systems

d. the social division of medicine

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 13]

13) The physical toll that inequality takes on people’s bodies is called

Feedback: A phenomenon that some epidemiologists and medical anthropologists and others call embodied inequality refers to the physical toll that inequality takes on people like Asha is sometimes explained as being the result of chronic individual stress; other times it is seen as the consequence of weak or absent social networks.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. structural violence

b. trauma

c. embodied inequality

d. maladaptation

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 14]

14) Which of the following terms describes social identities based on a shared medical diagnosis?

Feedback: Biosociality is the term medical anthropologists use to describe social identities that are based on a shared medical diagnosis.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. biosociality

b. biomedicine

c. illness narrative

d. trauma

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 15]

15) Political organization around a biosocial identity in order to demand health-related interventions by the state or other organizations is called

Feedback: Health activism refers to political organization around a biosocial identity in order to demand health-related interventions by the state or other organizations.
Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. structural challenge

b. health activism

c. cosmopolitan medicine

d. trauma

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 16]

16) Government recognition of citizens’ health needs and intervention on their behalf is called

Feedback: Biological citizenship refers to government recognition of citizens’ health needs and to intervene on their behalf.
Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. health activism

b. structural recognition

c. cosmopolitan medicine

d. biological citizenship

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 17]

17) Which of the following is the term used by medical anthropologists to refer to the combined effects on a population of more than one disease, the effects of which are exacerbated by poor nutrition, social instability, violence, or other stressful environmental factors?

Feedback: Syndemic refers to the combined effects on a population of more than one disease, the effects of which are exacerbated by poor nutrition, social instability, violence, or other stressful environmental factors.
Page reference: What Makes Medical Anthropology “Biocultural”?

a. Culture-bound syndrome

b. Epidemic

c. Demographic

d. Syndemic

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 18]

18) Medical anthropologists who seek to understand human sickness and health in an evolutionary context sometimes use the concept of

Feedback: Adaptation are adjustments by an organism (or group of organisms) that help them cope with environmental challenges of various kinds.
Page reference: What Makes Medical Anthropology “Biocultural”?

a. adaptation

b. syndemic

c. epidemic

d. race memory

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 19]

19) Some scientific observers connect the ability to absorb lactose successfully to what cultural practices?

Feedback: Some scientific observers noticed that adults able to absorb lactose successfully appeared to be members of human populations that had a history of keeping dairy herds. As William Durham (1991) observed, this hypothesis “includes the concept of cultural mediation at its very core, since the hypothesized fitness advantage of [lactose absorption genetic variants] would have depended upon the presence of socially transmitted values and beliefs that supported dairying” (241). Subsequent efforts have confirmed this connection, not only for dairying peoples of Europe but also in Africa and elsewhere.

Page reference: What Makes Medical Anthropology “Biocultural”?

a. a history of keeping dairy herds

b. a history of consuming honey

c. a history of consuming refined sugar

d. a history of nursing infants longer than two years

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 20]

20) According to Tom Boellstorff, which experience of the self do aficionados of Second Life regularly experience?

Feedback: Decentered, rather than unified selves, are not just the product of postmodern philosophical theory. Such selves are regularly experienced by aficionados of virtual reality gaming. This was already apparent a decade ago when anthropologist Tom Boellstorff carried out fieldwork in the virtual reality computer program Second Life, whose players created alternative avatars, or alts, with which they would sometimes log on.

Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

a. decentered selves

b. unified and integrated selves

c. bounded selves

d. dividual selves

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 21]

21) A story told by sufferers (sometimes together with their caregivers) that explains the source of an individual’s suffering is called

Feedback: The study of illness narratives is a form of interpretive medical anthropology that allows outside observers, such as biomedical specialists, to understand the perspectives of individual experiences of illness shaped by nonbiomedical beliefs and practices. Some illness narratives show that people may interpret the cause of their suffering in ways that have nothing to do with biomedical factors, but much to do with social beliefs shared by members of their society.

Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

a. an illness narrative

b. a metaphorical narrative

c. an allegorical narrative

d. a subjective narrative

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 22]

22) Medical anthropologists use which of the following terms to refer to events in life generated by forces and agents external to the person and largely external to his or her control; specifically, events generated in the setting of armed conflict and war?

Feedback: Trauma refers to events in life generated by forces and agents external to the person and largely external to his or her control; specifically, events generated in the setting of armed conflict and war.
Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

a. structural violence

b. trauma

c. experiential health

d. circumscribed agency

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 23]

23) According to Paul Farmer, the fact that poor Haitian women were more likely to die of AIDS and poor Haitian men were more likely to die of violent injury is an illustration of what he calls

Feedback: Structural violence is violence that results from the way that political and economic forces structure risk for various forms of suffering within a population.

Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

a. trauma

b. structural violence

c. experiential health

d. the social division of suffering

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 24]

24) Medical anthropologists argue that a more accurate way to refer to Western biomedical systems adopted by people in non-Western societies around the world is

Feedback: Leslie also emphasized that wherever cosmopolitan medicine is found, it always coexists with a range of alternative ethnomedical systems based on practices of local sociocultural groups—a state of affairs called medical pluralism.
Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. experiential health

b. medical pluralism

c. cosmopolitan medicine

d. the social division of medicine

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 25]

25) In the 1970s in Guider, Cameroon, a man and his wife were seeking therapy for infertility. First they went to the local biomedical clinic, then to a local Muslim practitioner, and finally made plans to consult a traditional non-Muslim healer living outside of town. This pattern of successive medical consultation can only occur in a situation of

Feedback: Medical pluralism is the coexistence of ethnomedical systems alongside cosmopolitan medicine.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. medical pluralism

b. structural violence

c. colonialism

d. the social division of medicine

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 26]

26) Sydney Spangler, a medical anthropologist, argues that differential health outcomes experienced among Tanzanian women seeking the help of midwives at a Tanzanian village medical dispensary were due to

Feedback: Forms of assisted reproduction that originated in Western biomedicine have now spread across the world. For poor women in states like Tanzania, structural violence can create forms of social exclusion that produce embodied inequality in the bodies of women exposed to stress and neglect when they deliver their babies. Some decide they will be better off giving birth at home rather than face the cash expenses and the risk of public humiliation and neglect if they attempt to give birth at the local health center.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. their unwillingness to deal with biomedical practitioners

b. their experience of social exclusion

c. the lack of training of midwives

d. their ignorance of the experience of labor and delivery

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 27]

27) Which of the following statements summarizes Sydney Spangler’s conclusions about the poor women she knew who were about to give birth?

Feedback: But the poor women Spangler knew did the best they could to minimize their risk at the time of delivery while attempting to minimize the risk to their families of public humiliation or debt. For nearly half of all women in the district, this meant giving birth at home, which seemed the lesser of the evils. Spangler (2011) was impressed that “some disadvantaged women sought biomedical care despite the hurdles they had to overcome” (492). But her research led her to conclude that the health outcomes they experienced could not be explained only in terms of their individual behavior.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. They did the best they could to minimize risk at the time of delivery while attempting to minimize the risk to their families of public humiliation or debt.

b. They did the best they could to minimize risk at the time of delivery, even if this meant that their families had to take out loans to pay for care at the dispensary.

c. They did the best they could to minimize risk at the time of delivery, which is why they always preferred to consult midwives at the dispensary.

d. They were so anxious about giving birth that they ignored pragmatic solutions and demanded that midwives attend them in their own homes.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 28]

28) Which of the following statements describes the position of rural Tanzanian AIDS patients whom Rebecca Marsland knew in rural Tanzania?

Feedback: AIDS patients in this rural Tanzanian community did not separate their own individual wellbeing from the well-being of their families, many of whose members’ daily lives were difficult although they were not suffering from AIDS. As Marsland (2012) put it, “The demands that a pharmaceutical places on the body cannot always be placed before the hunger and the health of one’s family” (482). Peasant farmers in the best of times had to work hard in their fields to feed their families. AIDS patients could afford neither the “healthy” diet recommended at the clinic nor the luxury of lessening their workload—especially because they felt responsible for the well-being of family members and not themselves alone.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. The demands that a pharmaceutical places on the body cannot always be placed before the hunger and the health of one’s family.

b. The demands that a pharmaceutical places on the body of the individual receiving treatment must always get priority.

c. Tanzanian AIDS patients regarded themselves as autonomous individuals responsible for managing a treatment regime designed for their individual health needs alone.

d. AIDS patients in rural Tanzania were always able to find sufficient food so that they never had to take their ARVs on an empty stomach.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 29]

29) Which of the following statements describes the experience of rural Tanzanians who were interested in becoming health activists?

Feedback: Biosociality and its consequences play out differently for HIV/AIDS patients in rural Tanzania than in Brazil. In rural Tanzania, biosocial identity for people with HIV/AIDS overlaps with family or neighborhood identities, and the government is unresponsive to health activism. As in Brazil, however, neoliberal economic reforms have gutted national welfare and health-care programs for the poor.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. Their efforts were supported by a legal regime, inherited from the colonial period, which strongly supports grassroots organizing.

b. Their efforts were undermined by a legal regime, inherited from the colonial period, which strictly controls grassroots organizing.

c. NGO managers are eager to share resources and partner with self-help groups organized by poor AIDS patients.

d. AIDS patients were increasingly successful as health activists.

Type: true-false

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 30]

30) Based on their experiences delivering antiretroviral (ARV) therapy in Haiti and Rwanda through Partners in Health, Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim recommend that ARVs should be made universally available and free to all those who needed them.

Feedback: Farmer and Kim offered advice to the medical community, based on their experiences delivering ARV therapy in Haiti and Rwanda through Partners in Health, the nongovernmental organization (NGO) they founded (328): ARVs should be made universally available and free to all those who needed them to ensure that the poor were not excluded.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 31]

31) An example of the role of cultural practices shaping natural selection on genes that affect human health concerns

Feedback: Many North Americans of European ancestry have been told for years that cows’ milk is nature’s perfect food and think nothing of consuming milk well into adulthood. Yet biomedical researchers discovered in the 1960s that many people around the world are unable to digest fresh milk in adulthood. This became particularly obvious when adults in places like South Asia were sickened when they tried to consume powdered fresh milk sent as a form of foreign aid by the U.S. government. It turned out that the milk sugar lactose provoked these digestive upsets. Most human infants are able to absorb lactose because their digestive systems produce the enzyme lactase, but the production of lactase decreases as children grow up. After this occurs, adults without lactase who consume fresh milk can develop serious intestinal upsets and are said to be “lactose intolerant.”

Page reference: What Makes Medical Anthropology “Biocultural”?

a. sufferer’s nerves

b. lactose intolerance

c. sucrose intolerance

d. an epidemic

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 32]

32) According to Tom Boellstorff, the experience of individual selves in Second Life is best demonstrated by the creation of

Feedback: Decentered, rather than unified selves, are not just the product of postmodern philosophical theory. Such selves are regularly experienced by aficionados of virtual reality gaming. This was already apparent a decade ago when anthropologist Tom Boellstorff carried out fieldwork in the virtual reality computer program Second Life, whose players created alternative avatars, or alts, with which they would sometimes log on.

Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

a. alts

b. avatars

c. autonomous selves

d. unified and integrated selves

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 33]

33) Which of the following best describes how Korwa people understand illness?

Feedback: The Korwa word that most closely translates as “health” is sukh, “a condition of all around prosperity with bodily health as an integral component. Most of the informants expressed ideas on embeddedness of health in social, economic, and emotional conditions of existence” (Gaur and Patniak 2011, 90). These conditions of existence are connected to their traditional forest home, where Korwa felt protected by family and village deities and where they lived in harmony with natural, social, and supernatural worlds. “By contrast, illness is attributed to disruption, disorderliness, disharmony, and imbalance in relationship with the ‘three worlds’ that are played out on the body” (91), leading to physical difficulties in carrying out the activities of daily life. As a result, “The Korwa, both young and old, consider the forest their actual ‘home’ and associate all of their maladies with the new living space” (92).

Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

a. possessing a disease-free bodily state

b. living a forest-based life

c. encountering disruption, disorder, and disharmony associated with their living in locations outside the forest

d. suffering from chronic ailments associated with life in the forest.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 34]

34) In the 1970s in Guider, Cameroon, a man and his wife were seeking therapy for infertility. First they went to the local biomedical clinic, then to a local Muslim practitioner, and finally made plans to consult a traditional non-Muslim healer living outside of town. This pattern of successive medical consultation is called

Feedback: Medical pluralism was present in Guider, Cameroon, in 1976 when the authors were living there (Figure 16.9). For example, one husband described the hierarchy of resort that he and his wife had followed when seeking therapy for infertility. First, they had gone to the local biomedical clinic, which had nothing to offer them. Their next visit was to a local Muslim practitioner whose therapy involved copying out key verses from the Qur’an onto a board, washing off the ink with which they had been written, and instructing the patient to drink the ink. This, too, had proved unsatisfactory. When we last spoke, the man said that he and his wife were now thinking of consulting a traditional non-Muslim Fali healer living outside Guider, who had a reputation for success in cases of infertility.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. a hierarchy of resort

b. an ethnomedical system

c. the social division of medicine

d. structural violence

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 35]

35) Anthropologists Joao Biehl is concerned that regional governments in Brazil have been forced to alter their health budgets drastically to accommodate the demand for high-cost medicines like antiretroviral drugs. He calls this phenomenon

Feedback: Unfortunately, although the Brazilian government agreed to pay for ARVs for all citizens, neoliberal economic pressures undermined other aspects of the governmental health and welfare infrastructure, leading to the pharmaceuticalization of public health. The kinds of support structures necessary for successful ARV therapy among the poor were disappearing, with tragic results.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

a. structural violence

b. embodied inequality

c. the pharmaceuticalization of public health

d. the socialization of medicine

Type: Short Answer

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 36]

36) Explain how anthropologists define and use the term suffering. How do they apply this concept? Provide examples from the text.

Feedback: Many medical anthropologists prefer to use the term suffering to describe the forms of physical, mental, or emotional distress experienced by individuals who may or may not subscribe to biomedical understandings of disease. Medical anthropologists have often used the term sickness to refer to classifications of physical, mental, and emotional distress recognized by members of a particular cultural community. Sometimes, such sicknesses may bear a close resemblance to diseases recognized by scientific biomedicine, but other times, the sickness (and the therapy to relieve it) may be unique to a particular cultural group. Such sicknesses have been called culture-bound syndromes. Finally, some medical anthropologists contrast both the biomedical understanding of disease and the local cultural categories of sickness with a suffering person’s own understanding of his or her distress, which is called illness.

Page reference: What Is Medical Anthropology?

Type: Short Answer

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 37]

37) What is structural violence? Explain how the Haitian case studies in the text are examples of structural violence.

Feedback: Structural violence is violence that results from the way that political and economic forces structure risk for various forms of suffering within a population.

Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

Type: Short Answer

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 16 Question 38]

38) Define the terms biosociality and biological citizenship. How do anthropologists use these concepts to analyze the history of HIV/AIDS in Brazil?

Feedback: Biosociality is the term medical anthropologists use to describe social identities that are based on a shared medical diagnosis. Biological citizenship refers to government recognition of citizens’ health needs and to intervene on their behalf.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 16 Question 39]

39) Explain the process whereby sickle cell anemia a biocultural adaptation. How does this process influence our understanding and treatment of the condition?

Feedback: Most evolutionary biologists tend to restrict their attention to biological adaptations: modifications of anatomical or physiological attributes of individual organisms, produced by natural selection, that better adjust organisms to the environmental settings in which they live. Medical anthropologists are particularly interested in cases where there is strong evidence that human cultural practices have influenced natural selection on genes that affect human health and hence must be understood as biocultural adaptations.
Page reference: What Makes Medical Anthropology “Biocultural”?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 16 Question 40]

40) Analyze the concepts of social suffering and trauma. What is trauma? Using case material from this chapter, explain why this phenomenon is important for anthropologists to understand. Discuss the effects of social suffering and trauma on both individuals and groups. How have anthropologists begun to study these issues?

Feedback: Structural violence is violence that results from the way that political and economic forces structure risk for various forms of suffering within a population. Much of this suffering is in the form of infectious and parasitic disease. But it can also include other forms of extreme suffering such as hunger, torture, and rape (Farmer 2002, 424). Farmer’s work highlights the effects of structural violence on the production of individual subjectivity. The operations of structural violence create circumscribed spaces in which the poorest and least powerful members of Haitian society are subjected to highly intensified risks of all kinds, increasing the likelihood that sooner or later they will experience one or more varieties of social suffering. Trauma refers to events in life generated by forces and agents external to the person and largely external to his or her control; specifically, events generated in the setting of armed conflict and war.

Page reference: How Do People with Different Cultures Understand the Causes of Sickness and Health?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 16 Question 41]

41) How does Spangler’s case study of giving birth in Tanzania illustrate social exclusion and structural violence?

Feedback: Forms of assisted reproduction that originated in Western biomedicine have now spread across the world. For poor women in states like Tanzania, structural violence can create forms of social exclusion that produce embodied inequality in the bodies of women exposed to stress and neglect when they deliver their babies. Some decide they will be better off giving birth at home rather than face the cash expenses and the risk of public humiliation and neglect if they attempt to give birth at the local health center.

Page reference: How Are Human Sickness and Health Shaped by the Global Capitalist Economy?