Kroeber Anthropological
Society Papers
Nos. 69-70, 1989
Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers
Nos. 69-70, 1989
Preface Linda Green
Medical Anthropology
Castigations of a Selfish Housewife: National Identity and Menopausal
Rhetoric in Japan Margaret Lock ..............................................................1
The Sources of Pain, Distress and Misery: A Medical Anthropological
Perspective on the Symbolic Bridge between Social Structure
and Physiology Arthur Kleinman ............................................................. 14
Indigenous Pharmaceuticals, the Capitalist World System and Civilization
Charles Leslie .............................................................. 23
The Nervous System Part 1: Homesickness & Dada Michael Taussig ............ ......... 32
Three Propositions For a Critically Applied Medical Anthropology
Nancy Scheper-Hughes ................. ............................................ 62
Psychological Anthropology
Preliminary Notes on the Glossing of Emotions Vincent Crapanzano ............ .......... 78
"Self-Sacrifice": An Example from the Anglo-Zulu War
Robert B. Edgerton ............................................................. 86
Ghost Busters in Anthropology Richard A. Shweder .................................... .......... 100
The Self and Instrumental Model in the Study of Culture Change
and ModernizationGeorge and Louise Spindler .............................................. 109
Publications List, Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers ........................ ................... 117
The Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers
Numbers 69 and 70, 1989
Editor-in-Chief: Linda Green
Editors: Jennifer Beer, Elizabeth Crane, Cecelia de Mello, Mary Beth Mills, Sarah Murray
Computer Typesetting: Mary Beth Mills
Special thanks to Scott Morgan for his invaluable advice
Meeting Organizers: Marcia Inhorn, Scott Morgan (Medical Anthropology, 1986); Roland
Moore, Cecilia de Mello, Scott Morgan, Marcia Inhorn (Psychological Anthropology,
1987)
Printed by GRT Printing, Oakland, CA
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Preface
This edition of the Kroeber Anthropological Society (KAS) Papers brings together a
collection of essays delivered during two successive plenary sessions of the annual KAS
meetings. In the spring of 1986 several well-known scholars in the sub-field of medical
anthropology participated in a symposium on "The Anthropology of Sickness", and the following
year distinguished psychological anthropologists were invited to discuss their recent
work in a forum entitled "Self, Experience, and Emotion." The essays collected here
address seemingly diverse issues in social-cultural anthropology, yet two themes emerge:
the importance of culture in its broadest sense and the interrelationship between culture,
society and the individual. In Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986: 19), James Clifford has suggested that "culture is contested, temporal and emergent"
and "representation and explanation - both by insiders and outsiders - is implied in this
emergence." The following articles place some of the salient issues of contemporary
anthropology at center stage.
In her article on the cultural construction of menopause in Japan, Lock is critical of
the role of biomedicine in shaping clinical "facts" to "fit" a prescribed (and changing) cultural
role for women. Leslie discusses the changing social relations of Ayurvedic medicine
in terms of the history and economics of the indigenous pharmaceuticals industry. Kleinman
proposes a fusing of medical anthropology with medical epidemiology which could
lead to a "radical breakthrough in how we conceive of the nexus of biology, culture, sickness
and society" and a "rethinking of medicine as a human enterprise." Scheper-Hughes,
on the other hand, takes an adversarial position toward the hegemonic role of Westem
biomedicine in legitimating the status quo, and advocates the work of a "critically applied
medical anthropology" to operate "at the margins, questioning premises, and subjecting
epistemologies that represent powerful, political interests to oppositional thinking".
Taussig's "Nervous System" casts us into the penumbra between the sign and the signifier
where the intellectual enterprise (of oppression) is brought into question.
In the second half of the collection, Crapanzano examines the "transactional basis"
of our emotions, which lies hidden behind culturally constructed ideas about the self and
the psychology of emotion. Edgerton explores the power of cultural beliefs to overpower
concerns for self-preservation among Zulu warriors during the nineteenth-century Anglo-
Zulu war. In his essay entitled "Ghostbusters in Anthropology" Shweder proposes fusing
the directive force of culture with its directive content, which he argues "would be tantamount
to a revolutionary rethinking of the relationship between culture and nature, subjectivity
and objectivity." Finally, the Spindlers discuss their abiding interest in the intersections
of concepts of self and personhood with cultural change.
These essays are by no means homogeneous in their content or epistemology. They
nonetheless constitute research on questions of importance not only to medical and psychological
anthropologists but - as contributions to an understanding of the dynamic role of
culture in mediating social structure and lived experience - to social-cultural anthropology
in general.
- Linda Green, Editor