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CHAPTER 1 Re/inventing Medical Anthropology: Definitional Struggles and Key Debates (Or: Answering the Cri Du Coeur)
Elisa J. Sobo
INTRODUCTION
The distinct subfield called “medical anthropology” emerged in the 1970s as the outcome of many lines of intertwined inquiry. Interest in diverse health practices and understandings goes back centuries, pre-dating anthropology’s establishment as an academic discipline. However, after World War II, a notable subset within the field began to consider health a topic worthy of focused specialization. Anglophone anthropology’s participation in post-World War II international and public health efforts fueled this impulse: Data collected in earlier times for simple descriptive purposes proved invaluable as these scholars worked to help said health programs succeed. That is, medical anthropology’s concretized emergence was driven by ethnology’s newly valuable, directly “technical” (Scotch 1963) relevance. Indeed, the first review of the nascent field, William Caudill’s “Applied Anthropology in Medicine” (1953), emphasized its practical utility.
The shorter phrase “medical anthropology” seems first to have been used by P.T. Regester (1956) and then by Khwaja Hasan and B.G. Prasad (1959), while an article by James Roney carried the phrase in its title (1959). But what did this label describe? What tensions did it encompass? Did these tensions exhibit different characteristics in different global settings?
Building on previous historical reviews (including Anderson 2018; Browner 1997; Claudill 1953; Colson and Selby 1974; Fabrega 1971; Foster 1974; Foster and Anderson 1978; Good 1994; Hasan 1975; Lock and Nichter 2002; McElroy 1986; Polgar 1962; Scotch 1963; Sobo 2004; Todd and Ruffini 1979; Weidman 1986), I examine medical anthology’s rise as a named subfield. This process unfolded initially in the USA, where the great majority of medical anthropologists were, and still are, concentrated. However, anthropology is an international discipline: The subfield’s emergence depended on inputs from