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Millennial Medical Anthropology: From There to Here and Beyond, or the Problem of Global Health

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Abstract

While much of Medical Anthropology was and is what we can call “Normal” (following Kuhn) Medical Anthropology, I coined the term Millennial Medical Anthropology for that branch of the discipline that, in the 1990s, was departing from the Normal research paradigms and was deserving of a distinct sobriquet. This paper considers the Strong Program in Medical Anthropology’s Millennial Medical Anthropology and its key subdivisions, the Cultural Studies of Science and Cultural Bioethics. Specifically it considers Medical Anthropology’s movement from the past into an ethical future wherein Normal Biomedicine, Bioethics and Global Health are problematized. This provides the basis for the construction of a truly anthropological global health (i.e., Global, Global Health or Global Health 2.0).

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Acknowledgments

This paper was presented at the Society for Medical Anthropology Meeting, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, September 2009. I thank Nicole Ueda for the label Global Health 2.0.

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Correspondence to Atwood D. Gaines.

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Gaines, A.D. Millennial Medical Anthropology: From There to Here and Beyond, or the Problem of Global Health. Cult Med Psychiatry 35, 83–89 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-010-9203-x

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