This article is part of the following series: Bioculturalism
This series aims to get anthropologists and closely-related others talking seriously, and thinking practically, about how to synergize biological and social scientific approaches to human health and well-being, and to what positive ends. In this interview, Bill Dressler responds to questions posed by series organizer Jeffrey G. Snodgrass.
How and why might cultural anthropologists and social scientists interested …
This article is part of the following series: Bioculturalism
I’m perplexed by cultural anthropology’s antagonism toward biology, with culture and biology more typically treated as providing alternate and competing, rather than complementary and synergistic, explanations for human functioning. This is particularly strange to me—a practicing cultural anthropologist with a background in molecular biology—when even medical anthropologists fail to account for the role biology plays in shaping human health. Wouldn’t …
María and I finished our three hours together with a blood spot and a hug. It was an extra long hug, and I couldn’t be sure if it was her or me who lingered. I was three-fourths of the way through my dissertation research at one of Chicago’s oldest public hospital clinics and it had been an intense period. María …
This post is largely unaltered from its original form on the new blog Psychocultural Cinema, which focuses on the intersection of medical and psychological anthropology with ethnographic and documentary filmmaking.
Orwell was once asked by his editor to address the question “why I write.” Orwell, in his typically clear and direct manner, listed a range of reasons, from personal …
The “Bio-Social Methods for a Vitalist Social Science” Workshop – held at the University of Birmingham on July 16, 2013 – aimed to reaffirm the role of the social sciences in a time when insights from behavioural science such as social psychology, behavioural economics, environmental psychology, neuroeconomics, and neuroscience are increasing being used to justify new policy mechanisms in the …
Last spring I found myself in rural Alabama, sitting between an investigative journalist and a candid salesman I’ll call Sid, who was hawking used and potentially contaminated former FEMA trailers to those displaced by a series of tornados. These trailers had originally been issued by the federal government after Hurricane Katrina and were found to contain elevated levels of formaldehyde…