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Guest Editor's Introduction

Guest Editor's Introduction last two decades and an attendant decline in the popular prestige of American and European health-care delivery systems, it has proven impossible to contain the scandal of critical study of medicine, disease, and health-care institutions. There have been numerous approaches to opening “medicine” -that diverse and overflowing category- to scholarly examination. Ethnographic strategies have attempted to remove nonbiomedical healing methods from the realm of the exotic-which can be seen as harmless at bestwhile treating sites at the heart of the bioscience enterprise as “other cultures.” Historical approaches have uncovered debates that reveal the arbitrary and contingent roots of scientific method, as well as events that demonstrate the complicity of scientific practice with forms of domination and exclusion. Some of these approaches have brought together the methods of anthropology and history in studies of colonial medicine and disease. Such studies of European expansion have gone beyond demonstrating that medicine has often been a tool of empire to show that events and institutions also dominate materially, transforming bodily life. As a consequence, historical change in many domains ramifies into developments in the worlds of medicine (and vice versa, of course). A narrow history of medicine -seen as an autonomous domain http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

Guest Editor's Introduction

Farquhar, Judith; Hanson, Marta
positions asia critique , Volume 6 (3) – Dec 1, 1998
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1998 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-6-3-507
Publisher site
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Abstract

last two decades and an attendant decline in the popular prestige of American and European health-care delivery systems, it has proven impossible to contain the scandal of critical study of medicine, disease, and health-care institutions. There have been numerous approaches to opening “medicine” -that diverse and overflowing category- to scholarly examination. Ethnographic strategies have attempted to remove nonbiomedical healing methods from the realm of the exotic-which can be seen as harmless at bestwhile treating sites at the heart of the bioscience enterprise as “other cultures.” Historical approaches have uncovered debates that reveal the arbitrary and contingent roots of scientific method, as well as events that demonstrate the complicity of scientific practice with forms of domination and exclusion. Some of these approaches have brought together the methods of anthropology and history in studies of colonial medicine and disease. Such studies of European expansion have gone beyond demonstrating that medicine has often been a tool of empire to show that events and institutions also dominate materially, transforming bodily life. As a consequence, historical change in many domains ramifies into developments in the worlds of medicine (and vice versa, of course). A narrow history of medicine -seen as an autonomous domain

Journal

positions asia critique – Duke University Press

Published: Dec 1, 1998

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