Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture

An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry

Arthur Kleinman

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520045118
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520340848
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement.I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• 1. Orientations 1: The Problem, the Setting, and the Approach
• 2. Orientations 2: Culture, Health Care Systems, and Clinical Reality
• 3. Orientations 3: Core Clinical Functions and Explanatory Models
• 4. The Cultural Construction of Illness Experience and Behavior, 1: Affects and Symptoms in Chinese Culture
• 5. The Cultural Construction of Illness Experience and Behavior, 2: A Model of Somatization of Dysphoric Affects and Affective Disorders
• 6. Family-Based Popular Health Care
• 7. Patients and Healers: Transactions Between Explanatory Models and Clinical Realities
• 8. Patients and Healers: Transactions Between Explanatory Models and Clinical Realities
• 9. The Healing Process
• 10. Epilogue: Implications
• Glossary of Selected Terms
• Bibliography
• Index