Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003. 32:447–74

ANTHROPOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND
DISEASE: A Review

Vinh-Kim Nguyen1 and Karine Peschard2
1Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, Montr´eal,
Qu´ebec,
Canada H2A 1X1; email: [log in to unmask]
2Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montr´eal, Qu´ebec, Canada
H3A 2T7;
email: [log in to unmask]

Key Words embodiment, biopolitics, structural violence, commodification,
infectious diseases, biomedicine

Anstract
Anthropological approaches broaden and deepen our understanding of
the finding that high levels of socioeconomic inequality correlate with
worsened health
outcomes across an entire society. Social scientists have debated whether
such societies
are unhealthy because of diminished social cohesion, psychobiological
pathways,
or the material environment. Anthropologists have questioned these
mechanisms, emphasizing
that fine-grained ethnographic studies reveal that social cohesion is
locally
and historically produced; psychobiological pathways involve complex,
longitudinal
biosocial dynamics suggesting causation cannot be viewed in purely
biological terms;
and material factors in health care need to be firmly situated within a
broad geopolitical
analysis. As a result, anthropological scholarship argues that this finding
should be
understood within a theoretical framework that avoids the pitfalls of
methodological
individualism, assumed universalism, and unidirectional causation. Rather,
affliction
must be understood as the embodiment of social hierarchy, a form of
violence that
for modern bodies is increasingly sublimated into differential disease
rates and can
be measured in terms of variances in morbidity and mortality between social
groups.
Ethnographies on the terrain of this neoliberal global health economy
suggest that the
violence of this inequality will continue to spiral as the exclusion of
poorer societies
from the global economy worsens their health—an illness poverty trap that,
with few
exceptions, has been greeted by a culture of indifference that is the
hallmark of situations
of extreme violence and terror. Studies of biocommodities and biomarkets
index
the processes by which those who are less well off trade in their long-term
health
for short-term gain, to the benefit of the long-term health of better-off
individuals.
Paradoxically, new biomedical technologies have served to heighten the
commodifi-
cation of the body, driving this trade in biological futures as well as
organs and body
parts.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WELFARE "REFORM": New Perspectives on U.S. Urban
Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era
  Sandra Morgen, Jeff Maskovsky
  Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32: 315-338 (Volume publication date
Oct 2003)

Abstract
Anthropological research on welfare restructuring differs from most
poverty research conducted by U.S. policy analysts and many other social
scientists
by its situating the study of welfare “reform” within an examination of the
production
of poverty and inequality at the center of the global system of advanced
capitalism. In
this review we examine urban poverty and welfare-state restructuring in
relation to the
ascent of neoliberalism, including the rise of market-oriented assumptions
about social
value, productivity, and investment that dominate civic life and public
policy.We focus
primarily, though not exclusively, on the United States. After a brief
review of four
theoretical frameworks that inform ethnographic research on welfare, we
explore five
approaches or themes in anthropological studies of welfare restructuring in
the United
States: (a) the ethnographic challenge to claims of policy success by
documenting
an unfolding crisis in social reproduction for the poor; (b) deconstructing
the hegemonic
discourse on welfare restructuring and juxtaposing it with the lived
realities of
impoverished households; (c) contesting and moving beyond the behaviorism
of mainstream
poverty research; (d) exploring the multiple perspectives of those
differently
situated within the welfare-state apparatus; and (e) theorizing the
relationship between
welfare restructuring and an eroding social citizenship of the poor. The
analysis of
gender, race, and, to a lesser extent, class is central to ethnographic
research on welfarestate

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