Arthur Kleinman, "Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine" (U California Press, 1997)

03/01/23 • 32 min

One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate.

Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine (U California Press, 1997). explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems—for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain—are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics. Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.

A copy of the transcript can be found here

Show notes:

--World Mental Health: Problems and Priorities in Low-Income Countries

--The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine

--Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan

--How bodies remember: Social memory and bodily experience of criticism, resistance and delegitimation following China's Cultural Revolution

--The Tanner Lecture at Stanford

--Nie Jing-Bao

--Amartya Sen

Shu Cao Mo, Ed.M. can be reached at [email protected].

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

A copy of the transcript can be found here

Show notes:

--World Mental Health: Problems and Priorities in Low-Income Countries

--The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine

--Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan

--How bodies remember: Social memory and bodily experience of criticism, resistance and delegitimation following China's Cultural Revolution

--The Tanner Lecture at Stanford

--Nie Jing-Bao

--Amartya Sen

Shu Cao Mo, Ed.M. can be reached at [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Previous Episode

Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)

In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (U California Press, 2023) makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.

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Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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