"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 clinics, East Asian medical schools as well as the interactions between various providers and patients (customers), Lock develops the cultural thesis ... In the process, she provides information on things most visitors to Japan have seen, heard, felt, and smelled but rarely understood."-Journal of Asian Studies "Breaks important new ground . . Lock discusses concrete medical practice and its cultural significance in general. ... rich in comparisons, engrossing to read, and analytically penetrating .... an important and absorbing book. It is an engaging account of how at least some Japanese people respond to universal problems. Most readers will obtain from it their first clear impression of what East Asian medicine actually is and does."-Journal of Japanese Studies "Of considerable significance for comparative cross-cultural studies of medicine, of which this is the best account for a Japanese setting that we now possess." --Monumenta Nipponica "Both Japan specialists and medical anthropologists will be stimulated, challenged, and engaged by this book.' --Medical Anthropology Newsletter

East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care)

History

Lock, Margaret M.

Asia

University of California Press

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.

Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care) (Volume 36)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Lindenbaum, Shirley

Mental Health

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 elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders. Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole. Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions.

Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

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 elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders. Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole. Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions.

Literature & Fiction

United States

"Social suffering" takes in the human consequences of war, famine, depression, disease, torture―the whole assemblage of human problems that result from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people―and also human responses to social problems as they are influenced by those forms of power. In the same way that the notion of social suffering breaks down boundaries between specific scholarly disciplines, this cross-disciplinary investigation allows us to see the twentieth century in a new frame, with new emphases. Anthropologists, historians, literary theorists, social medicine experts, and scholars engaged in the study of religion join together to investigate the cultural representations, collective experiences, and professional and popular appropriations of human suffering in the world today. These authors contest traditional research and policy approaches. Recognizing that neither the cultural resources of tradition nor those of modernity's various programs seem adequate to cope with social suffering in our times, they base their distinctive vision on the understanding that moral, political, and medical issues cannot be kept separate.

Social Suffering

Kleinman, Arthur

Das,Veena

Anthropology

Remaking a World completes a triptych of volumes on social suffering, violence, and recovery. Social Suffering, the first volume, deals with sources and major forms of social adversity, with an emphasis on political violence. The second, Violence and Subjectivity, contains graphic accounts of how collective experience of violence can alter individual subjectivity. This third volume explores the ways communities "cope" with―endure, work through, break apart under, transcend―traumatic and other more insidious forms of violence, addressing the effects of violence at the level of local worlds, interpersonal relations, and individual lives. The authors highlight the complex relationship between recognition of suffering in the public sphere and experienced suffering in people's everyday lives. Rich in local detail, the book's comparative ethnographies bring out both the recalcitrance of tragedy and the meaning of healing in attempts to remake the world.

Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Ramphele, Mamphela

Can Science Resolve the Nature / Nurture Debate? (New Human Frontiers)

Following centuries of debate about "nature and nurture" the discovery of DNA established the idea that nature (genes) determines who we are, relegating nurture (environment) to icing on the cake. Since the 1950s, the new science of epigenetics has demonstrated how cellular environments and certain experiences and behaviors influence gene expression at the molecular level, with significant implications for health and wellbeing. To the amazement of scientists, mapping the human genome indirectly supported these insights. Anthropologists Margaret Lock and Gisli Palsson outline vituperative arguments from Classical times about the relationship between nature and nurture, furthered today by epigenetic findings and the demonstration of a "reactive genome." The nature/nurture debate, they show, can never be put to rest, because these concepts are in constant flux in response to the new insights science continually offers.

Science & Math

Pálsson, Gísli

Biological Sciences

Polity

Medical Books

Medicine

In this fully revised and updated second edition of An Anthropology of Biomedicine, authors Lock and Nguyen introduce biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic work, the book critiques the assumption made by the biological sciences of a universal human body that can be uniformly standardized. It focuses on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies brings about radical changes to societies at large based on socioeconomic inequalities and ethical disputes, and develops and integrates the theory that the human body in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable, malleable entity. This second edition includes new chapters on: microbiology and the microbiome; global health; and, the self as a socio-technical system. In addition, all chapters have been comprehensively revised to take account of developments from within this fast-paced field, in the intervening years between publications. References and figures have also been updated throughout. This highly-regarded and award-winning textbook (Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and Anthropology) retains the character and features of the previous edition. Its coverage remains broad, including discussion of: biomedical technologies in practice; anthropologies of medicine; biology and human experiments; infertility and assisted reproduction; genomics, epigenomics, and uncertain futures; and molecularizing racial difference, ensuring it remains the essential text for students of anthropology, medical anthropology as well as public and global health.

An Anthropology of Biomedicine

Nguyen, Vinh-Kim

Wiley/Blackwell

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