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An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down. Introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics Develops and integrates an original theory: that the ...
Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings—even the endocrinological changes—associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies. Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of el...
Why our approaches to Alzheimer's and dementia are problematic and contradictory Due to rapidly aging populations, the number of people worldwide experiencing dementia is increasing, and the projections are grim. Despite billions of dollars invested in medical research, no effective treatment has been discovered for Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. The Alzheimer Conundrum exposes the predicaments embedded in current efforts to slow down or halt Alzheimer’s disease through early detection of pre-symptomatic biological changes in healthy individuals. Based on a meticulous account of the history of Alzheimer’s disease and extensive in-depth interviews, Margaret Lock highlights the limitations and the dissent associated with biomarker detection. Lock argues that basic research must continue, but should be complemented by a public health approach to prevention that is economically feasible, more humane, and much more effective globally than one exclusively focused on an increasingly harried search for a cure.
"A powerful intervention into one of the most important debates of our time. Meticulous in her methods and wise in her insight, Lock tames a sea of stormy argument to show how complex and consequential is the interplay of culture and biology. Her book will make great strides toward her ultimate goal: to dislodge the myth of the Menopausal Woman."—Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago
Medical knowledge and technology have been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. This text traces the discourse since 1970 that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain.
Medical knowledge and technology have been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. This text traces the discourse since 1970 that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain.
Where do our conventional understandings of health, illness, and the body stem from? What makes them authoritative? How are the boundaries set around these areas of life unsettled in the changing historical and political contexts of science, technology, and health care delivery? These questions are at the heart of Troubling Natural Categories, a collection of essays honouring the tradition of Margaret Lock, one of the preeminent medical anthropologists of our time. Throughout her career, Lock has investigated how medicine sets boundaries around what is deemed "normal" and "natural," and how, in turn, these ideas shape our technical and moral understandings of life, sickness, and death. In th...
The culture of contemporary medicine is the object of investigation in this book; the meanings and values implicit in biomedical knowledge and practice and the social processes through which they are produced are examined through the use of specific case studies. The essays provide examples of how various facets of 20th century medicine, including edu cation, research, the creation of medical knowledge, the development and application of technology, and day to day medical practice, are per vaded by a value system characteristic of an industrial-capitalistic view of the world in which the idea that science represents an objective and value free body of knowledge is dominant. The authors of th...
A theoretically sophisticated and cross-disciplinary reader in the anthropology of the body.
"An excellent description and analysis of East Asian medicine ... Based on fieldwork conducted in Japan during 1973 and 1974, which involved the use of a variecy of participant-observer techniques, as well as extensive reading in primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English, Lock's study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of an important dimension of life in Japan. . . In well-written chapters dealing with the philosophical foundations and historical development of East Asian medicine, Japanese attitudes regarding health, illness, and the human body, detailed description of kanpo clinics, herbal pharmacies, acupuncture and moxibustion clinics, shiatsu and anma cli...