Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture

From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement.   I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research.


From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered

Arthur Michael Kleinman, M.D. is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard University.

List of Figures
Preface

1. Orientations 1: The Problem, the Setting, and the Approach
2. Orientations 2: Culture, Health Care Systems, and Clinical Reality
3. Orientations 3: Core Clinical Functions and Explanatory Models
4. The Cultural Construction of Illness Experience and Behavior, 1: Affects and Symptoms in Chinese Culture
5. The Cultural Construction of Illness Experience and Behavior, 2: A Model of Somatization of Dysphoric Affects and Affective Disorders
6. Family-Based Popular Health Care
7. Patients and Healers: Transactions Between Explanatory Models and Clinical Realities. Part 1. Sacred Folk Healer-Client Relationships
8. Patients and Healers: Transactions Between Explanatory Models and Clinical Realities. Part 2: Professional Practitioner-Patient and Family-Patient Relationships
9. The Healing Process
10. Epilogue: Implications

Glossary
Bibliography
Index