Knowledge, Power, and Practice

These original essays, which combine theoretical argument with empirical observation, constitute a state-of-the-art platform for future research in medical anthropology. Ranging in time and locale, the essays are based on research in historical and cultural settings. The contributors accept the notion that all knowledge is socially and culturally constructed and examine the contexts in which that knowledge is produced and practiced in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology, and anthropology. Professionals in behavioral medicine, public health, and epidemiology as well as medical anthropologists will find their insights significant.

Shirley Lindenbaum is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and author of Kuru Sorcery (1979). Margaret Lock is Professor of Medical Anthopology at McGill University and author of East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan (California, 1980).

Preface

Part One
The Cultural Construction of Childbirth
Introduction to Part One
1 Traditional Birth Attendants in Rural North India: The
Social Organization of Childbearing
Roger Jeffery and Patricia M. Jeffery
2 Analysis of a Dialogue on Risks in Childbirth:
Clinicians, Epidemiologists, and Inuit Women
Patricia A. Kaufert and John O'Neil
3 Accounting for Amniocentesis
Rayna Rapp

Part Two
The Production of Medical Knowledge
Introduction to Part Two
4 "Learning Medicine": The Constructing of Medical
Knowledge at Harvard Medical School
Byron J. Good and
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good
5 A Description of How Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a
Mental Disorder (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder)
Allan Young
6 The Shape of Action: Practice in Public Psychiatry
Lorna Amarasingham Rhodes

Part Three
Contested Knowledge and Modes of Understanding
Introduction to Part Three
7 Lay Medical Knowledge in an African Context
Tola Olu Pearce
8 Biomedical Psychiatry as an Object for a Critical
Medical Anthropology
Horacio Fabrega, Jr.
9 Double Standards of Treatment Evaluation
Gilbert Lewis
10 Risk: Anthropological and Epidemiological Narratives
of Prevention
Ronald Frankenberg

Part Four
Constructing the Illness Experience
Introduction to Part Four
11 Identity, Disability, and Schizophrenia: The Problem of
Chronicity
Sue E. Estroff
12 Social Aspects of Chagas Disease
Roberto Briceflo-Leon

Part Five
Body Politics-Past and Present
Introduction to Part Five
13 The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism,
and the Black Body
Jean Comaroff
14 The Politics of Mid-Life and Menopause: Ideologies for
the Second Sex in North America and Japan
Margaret Lock
15 The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations
of Self in Immune System Discourse
Donna Haraway

Contributors
Index