Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine - Hardcover

This text explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. The book 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. It argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, 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 chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.

Arthur Kleinman is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Chairman of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.