Exploring Medical Anthropology

Citation

Joralemon, D., & Sundal, M. B. (2027). Exploring Medical Anthropology (5th ed.). Routledge. (Published August 2026.)

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Donald Joralemon (Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Smith College) and Mary B. Sundal (Professor of Anthropology, Washburn University) present the book in the preface as a concise and personal introduction rather than an exhaustive survey of the field. At about 140 pages in nine chapters, it rests on two of the authors' own research projects: Sundal's fieldwork on health and healing among the Karimojong agro-pastoralists of north-eastern Uganda, and Joralemon's research on organ transplantation in the United States. The book's central claims, according to the publisher, are that biology and culture matter equally in the experience of illness and disease, and that medical anthropology can help alleviate suffering; it presents competing theoretical perspectives in a balanced way. For the fifth edition the authors brought the Karimojong research into the whole book, merged the previous chapters on the 1991 Peruvian cholera epidemic into one, gave biomedicine its own chapter, and added material on intersectionality, reproductive health, public health and Covid-19, rapid ethnographic assessment and further ethnographic cases. Each chapter ends with a summary, suggested readings, notes and references, and the book has a glossary.

Chapter 1: What's So Cultural about Health, Illness, and Disease?

Opening with a Karimojong mother's efforts to restore her sick child's health, the chapter discusses culture in medicine and the cultural metaphors of contemporary biomedicine, and outlines the development of medical anthropology, including Rudolf Virchow's argument that epidemics are social as well as medical. Arthur Kleinman's distinction between disease (a biological abnormality) and illness (the person's experience of it) is introduced. The summary places medical anthropology among the other social sciences of medicine.

Chapter 2: Anthropological Questions and Methods in the Study of Health and Healing

Two research projects show how anthropologists work: studying ethnomedicine among the Karimojong (research questions, participant observation and other methods, moving from fieldwork to analysis and interpretation), and studying biomedicine in the United States through organ transplantation as an anthropological subject, including interviews with recipients and the difficulty of gaining access to transplant professionals.

Chapter 3: Recognizing Biological, Social, and Cultural Interconnections

The 1991 Peruvian cholera epidemic is analysed through three theoretical perspectives in turn: the ecological/evolutionary framework, the political economy of critical medical anthropology, and the interpretive approach. Rapid ethnographic assessment appears as a method. The summary argues for combining perspectives rather than choosing one.

Chapter 4: Anthropological Contributions to Pandemic Studies

This chapter treats emerging and re-emerging diseases and epidemiological transitions, then three recent outbreaks: SARS, Covid-19 and Ebola. It closes with sections on studying pandemics, a political economy of pandemics, syndemics, and "global germ governance".

Chapter 5: Healers and the Healing Professions

The chapter turns to the diversity of healing practices, including medico-religious and Indigenous healers, Kleinman's sectors of health care, including the folk sector, the defining features of a healing profession, and concepts such as ethnophysiology and aetiology. It ends with a Karimojong Indigenous healer at work, including divination.

Chapter 6: Biomedicine as Ethnomedicine

Biomedicine is treated as one culturally shaped medical system among others. The chapter gives a brief history of biomedicine, considers the outcomes of biomedical healing and challenges to its authority (including critiques of racism in medical practice), discusses biomedicine as global medicine and the Alma-Ata declaration on primary health care, and ends by asking about the future of biomedicine in the United States.

Chapter 7: Medical Anthropology and the Global Drug Economy

Focusing mainly on prescription medicines, the chapter begins with the international context, including the sale of antibiotics without prescription and access to essential drugs in the Global South, and then turns to the pharmaceutical business in the United States, with the approval campaign for flibanserin as a case. It ends with the future of drug research in medical anthropology.

Chapter 8: Applying Medical Anthropology

The authors sketch the history of applied medical anthropology, give contemporary examples, review critical commentaries on applied work in health settings and the responses of practitioners, and ask whether anthropologists have something useful to offer. The summary looks at future directions for the field.

Chapter 9: Anthropology and Medical Ethics

The final chapter examines bioethics from an anthropological standpoint: whether ethical principles are universal or culturally specific, the idea of "ethnoethics" in other healing traditions, and debates in transplantation medicine and other areas such as the medicalisation of the sonogram.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: Foundations and Methods

• Disease and illness: Kleinman's distinction between biological abnormality and the sufferer's experience and interpretation of it.
• Medical pluralism: the use of several healing systems side by side, as among the Karimojong.
• Participant observation: the core fieldwork method, illustrated in both Uganda and American transplant medicine.

Chapters 3–4: Theory and Epidemics

• Ecological/evolutionary approach: analysis of how human behaviour, environment and pathogens shape each other through adaptation.
• Critical medical anthropology: attention to the political and economic structures that produce ill health.
• Interpretive approach: study of the meanings people give to sickness, through symbols, metaphors and narratives.
• Syndemics: the clustering and interaction of diseases with social conditions.

Chapters 5–7: Healing Systems and Drugs

• Ethnomedicine: any medical system, including biomedicine, as embedded in its own society and culture.
• Sectors of health care: Kleinman's division of the sources of healing, including the folk sector of Indigenous practitioners.
• Primary health care: the Alma-Ata vision of basic, accessible care.
• Pharmaceutical nexus: the political and social changes that accompany the globalisation of medicines.

Chapters 8–9: Application and Ethics

• Applied medical anthropology: the use of anthropological knowledge in health programmes and clinical settings.
• Bioethics and ethnoethics: biomedical ethics compared with the moral frameworks of other healing traditions.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Short and coherent. About 140 pages in nine chapters cover theory, methods, epidemics, healers, biomedicine, drugs, application and ethics, so the whole field can be introduced in a few weeks.
• Built on sustained cases. The Karimojong research and American transplant medicine recur throughout, and the Peruvian cholera epidemic is used to compare three theoretical perspectives on a single event; students see how one problem looks from different angles.
• Balanced on theory. The publisher stresses that competing perspectives are presented even-handedly; Chapter 3 puts ecological/evolutionary, critical and interpretive approaches side by side and argues for combining them.
• Current material. The fifth edition covers Covid-19, syndemics, rapid ethnographic assessment, intersectionality and critiques of racism in biomedicine, and includes images, text boxes, a glossary and suggested readings.

Limitations

• Selective by design. The preface says the book is not an exhaustive survey of the field and does not try to summarise research from around the world; at about 140 pages, many topics are introduced only briefly, and the suggested readings must carry students further.
• Heavy reliance on two research sites. The personal approach gives depth but means that much of the ethnographic evidence comes from Uganda and the United States.
• Biological detail is limited. The biocultural argument is made through cases rather than through systematic biology; students wanting the biological side in depth need a biocultural textbook.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is one of the two entry points to medical anthropology. Arthur Kleinman's The Illness Narratives, the other, is a single extended argument built from patients' stories of chronic illness; Joralemon and Sundal introduce Kleinman's disease/illness distinction in Chapter 1 and place it among the field's other perspectives, so reading this book first gives the framework within which Kleinman's book can be read.

For more depth, Wiley and Allen's Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach is a fuller textbook that sets out the biology of each condition before its cultural dimensions, filling the gap noted above. Brown and Closser's reader Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology supplies classic and recent articles, many on applied and global health topics that extend Chapters 3, 4 and 8. Lock and Nguyen's An Anthropology of Biomedicine and Byron Good's Medicine, Rationality and Experience are in-depth scholarly studies that develop the themes of Chapters 6 and 3 (biomedicine as a cultural system, and the interpretive approach) respectively.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes no previous coursework in anthropology or the health sciences and is written for a first course in medical anthropology.

• Read in order. Chapters 1–3 build the vocabulary and theory that later chapters rely on; Chapter 3's three-perspective analysis is the key to the rest.
• Core: Chapters 1–4 and 6 give the main theoretical perspectives, methods, epidemics and the cultural analysis of biomedicine.
• By interest: Chapters 5 and 7 suit courses on healing systems and pharmaceuticals; Chapters 8–9 suit students heading for applied, clinical or public-health careers.

Use the suggested readings at the end of each chapter to choose a full ethnography for an essay, and try applying the three perspectives of Chapter 3 to a current health problem. The glossary is useful for revision.