Now in an updated second edition, African American Religion remains an invaluable overview of the great diversity of religious groups within the modern African American community. This plethora of forms reflects a tension that has characterized African American religion since its beginnings—a tension between accommodation to and protest against white society’s domination.Viewing African American sectarianism as a response to racism and social stratification in the larger society, t...

With a new title that reflects the broad scope and primary concerns of the field, Introducing Health Anthropology: A Discipline in Action, Fourth Edition, provides students with a first look at the dynamic discipline of medical and health anthropology.The narrative is guided by four unifying themes. First, health anthropologists are heavily involved in the process of helping to better understand and change the world through their work in applied projects, policy initiatives, and a...

This text introduces undergraduate and graduate students in health or environment-related classes to the mounting crisis of syndemics through the lens of planetary health. The concept of syndemics, developed by the author and now in wide use across multiple health-related disciplines, focuses attention on the adverse synergistic interaction of two or more diseases or other health conditions promoted or facilitated by social and/or environmental conditions. The planetary health framework is...

This book applies a critical perspective to anthropogenic climate change and the global socio-ecological crisis.The book focuses on the critical anthropology of climate change by opening up a dialogue with the two main contending perspectives in the field, namely the cultural ecological and the cultural interpretive perspectives. Guided by these, the authors take a firm stance on the types of changes that are needed to sustain life on Earth as we know it. Within this framework, the...

This book focuses on syndemics in the Global South and uses COVID‑19 as a window to understand clusters of disparities and disease comorbidities. The pandemic has exposed and multiplied structural inequalities and certain subpopulations were more exposed to COVID‑19 as well as experienced greater morbidity and mortality. The effects of the pandemic differ between countries but have had an especially major impact, although in varying ways, in the Global South. The contributions in this volu...

The chapters in Foundations of Biosocial Health: Stigma and Illness Interactions, drawn primarily from medical anthropology, highlight the diverse ways in which various stigmatized health conditions interact with social inequalities and stigma to form syndemics. The authors delineate multiple examples of stigma-driven syndemics to demonstrate both the nature of disease interactions and how stigma contributes to, promotes, exacerbates, or perpetuates a syndemic. In so doing, the authors als...

Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society, and just plain useless—culturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other people. Leading medical anthropologists Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page analyze media representations, drug policy, and underlying social structures to show what industries and social sectors benefit from the criminalization, demon...

In this groundbreaking, global analysis of the relationship between climate change and human health, Hans Baer and Merrill Singer inventory and critically analyze the diversity of significant and sometimes devastating health implications of global warming. Using a range of theoretical tools from anthropology, medicine, and environmental sciences, they present ecosyndemics as a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between environmental change and disease. They also go beyond the ...

This book synthesizes the flourishing field of anthropology of infectious disease in a critical, biocultural framework. Leading medical anthropologist Merrill Singer holistically unites the behaviors of microorganisms and the activities of complex social systems, showing how we exist with pathogenic agents of disease in a complex process of co-evolution. He also connects human diseases to larger ecosystems and various other species that are future sources of new human infections. Anthropol...

The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction and overview to the critical perspective as it has evolved in medical anthropology over the last ten years. Standing as an opposition approach to conventional medical anthropology, critical medical anthropology has emphasized the importance of political and economy forces, including the exercise of power, in shaping health, disease, illness experience, and health care.

Central to this volume, and critical to its unique creative significance and contribution, is the conceptual unification of syndemics and stigma. Syndemics theory is increasingly recognized in social science and medicine as a crucial framework for examining and addressing pathways of interaction between biological and social aspects of chronic and acute suffering in populations. While much research to date addresses known syndemics such as those involving HIV, diabetes, and mental illness,...

Now in its third edition, this textbook serves to frame understandings of health, health-related behavior, and health care in light of social and health inequality as well as structural violence. It also examines how the exercise of power in the health arena and in society overall impacts human health and well-being.Medical Anthropology and the World System: Critical Perspectives, Third Edition includes updated and expanded information on medical anthropol...