The Anthropologies of Illness and Sickness: Further

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Ann. Rev. AnthropoL 1982. 11:257-85
Copyright @ 1982 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
THE ANTHROPOLOGIES
OF ILLNESS AND SICKNESS
Allan Young
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1982.11:257-285. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University,

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Cleveland, Ohio 44106
INTRODUCTION
Medical anthropology, as a field of research, writing, and professional

activity, has grown remarkably since the Annual Review of Anthropology
published its last articles on this subject. When Fabrega (42) and Colson
Selby (21) reviewed the 50 years since the publication of Rivers' Medicine,
Magic, and Religion (143) in 1924, they could cite only a handful of
monographs and edited volumes. And although they could refer to the
Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review (Montreal) and Ethnomedizin
(Hamburg), there was not yet any major journal devoted to this field.
In the past decade, however, a large number of publications have ap
peared: specialized collections (71, 76, 96, 99, 103, 105, 146, 150, 167, 170);
comprehensive anthologies (10, 65, 100, 114, 116, 123, 164); theoretical
works (43, 93); medical ethnographies (9, 38, 69, 83, 88, 108, 111, 128, 135,
139, 140, 145, 160, 186); large scale studies (20,33, 169); textbooks (30,51,
119, 122, 172; 187 is resolutely biomedical despite its title, however); and
a cross-cultural ethnomedical survey (125). Two monograph series are
under way, the "Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical
Care," under the editorship of Charles Leslie (77, 93, 105, 113, 163), and
the "Culture, Medicine, and Healing" series, edited by Arthur Kleinman
and others (19, 35, 97). Three major topical journals are now published:
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Medical Anthropology, and Social
Science and Medicine's quarterly issues on medical anthropology. The
Medical Anthropology Newsletter, a quarterly published by the Medical
Anthropology Association, has expanded to include original articles and is
now the best single source of book reviews in medical anthropology. In
addition to these periodicals, there is the Journal of Ethnopharmacology
and two new European journals, Ethnopsychiatrica (Claix, France) and
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0084-6570/82/1015-0257$02.00
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Curare (Wiesbaden). Finally, there is a long list of publications which are

products of recent conferences and symposia in medical anthropology (1,
2, 11, 39, 41, 63, 65, 76, 79, 80, 96, 103, 105-107, 109, 116, 118, 127, 144,
165, 168, 170, 171, 178).
Publications and conferences are only part of the story. A decade ago,
most medical anthropologists were either conventionally trained an
thropologists who had become interested in medical issues, or they were
physicians and nurses who had taken degrees in anthropology. Formal
education in medical matters generally took place outside the anthropologi
cal curriculum, if it took place at all. But here, too, there are remarkable
changes. By 1980, 20 universities in the United States were offering graduate
programs in medical anthropology, three-quarters of these at the doctoral

and postdoctoral levels (8, 158).
Why has medical anthropology grown so rapidly? In order to answer this
question, it is necessary to know something about anthropologists' motives
and methods.
Regarding motives, there are two strong reasons for anthropoligists'
increasing interest in sickness and medicine. One is connected with the
gradual emergence of a distinctive anthropological discourse on sickness,
and with it a compelling set of issues and arguments. Since most of what
I have to say in the following pages concerns these arguments, I shall set
them aside for the moment and tum to a second reason. Here it is the
appearance of new professional opportunities and the decline of old ones
that have induced anthropolgists to write and do research on medical
subjects. Some of the new opportunities originate in the efforts of clinicians
who have grown dissatisfied with the biological reductionism that continues
to be the conventional wisdom of their profession (17, 34, 36, 37, 44, 92,
95, 154). Under their aegis, anthropologists have been increasingly invited
into clinical settings, particularly in connection with programs in primary
care and family medicine. [For recent studies by anthropologists working
in Western clinical settings, see (3, 15, 18,27,51,58,59,62,70,84,92,104,
110, 115, 118, 136, 141, 142, 152). For comments on anthropologists as
clinicians, see (72, 147, 148)]. Other professional opportunities for an
thropologists originate in the high level of economic support that has been
available in the United States, at least until recently, for social scientists who
are interested in medical subjects. This combination of professional incen
tives helps to explain why much of the recent medical anthropology litera
ture is intended mainly for social and behavioral scientists with clinical
interests and responsibilities, and for clinicians and medical educators and
planners.
Regarding methods, anthropologists have three more or less distinct
ways of writing about sickness and healing. First, some anthropologists
ANTHROPOLOGY OF SICKNESS 259
describe medical beliefs and practices by using conceptual systems which

were originally intended for studying other phenomenological domains.
This is clear if we look back at some classic ethnographies which predate
the growth of contemporary medical anthropology: Evans-Pritchard's
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (40), Turner's Forest of
Symbols (161) and Drums ofAffliction (162), and Spiro's Burmese Super
naturalism (151). In spite of the fact that these monographs contain de
tailed descriptions of medical beliefs and practices (Evans-Pritchard and
Turner even include separate chapters on medical practices), anthropolo
gists usually do not think of them as examples of medical anthropology.
Rather, we talk about them as belonging to the anthropologies of religion,

comparative modes of thinking, witchcraft, ritual and symbol, culture and

psychology, and so on. That is, we think of them as originating in prob
lematics and analytical frameworks where sickness events are only vehicles
for understanding other constellations of facts. The point at hand is that
many of the books and articles cited in the first paragraphs of this review
are examples of the very same ethnographic traditions. This is not intended
to be a criticism, since many of these publications are excellent and impor
tant in their own right (e.g. 64, 85, 128, 134). Indeed, these kinds of analyses
may be the best ways to understand medical events in structurally simple,
kinship based societies where the experience of sickness is so thoroughly
externalized that the body is reduced to an uninformative "black box" and
people's attention is concentrated on the social and symbolic conditions of
sickness. [See, for example, Lewis's study of the Gnau of New Guinea
(108).]
Second, other anthropologists write about sickness and healing by using
methodologies and conceptualizations they have borrowed from medical
sociology. As a field of research and writing, medical sociology was estab
lished relatively early. It is now thoroughly conceptualized, and its methods
and perspectives have been tailored for conducting research in industrial
societies. In each of these respects, it contrasts with medical anthropology,
and it is no surprise that anthropologists who have only recently begun to
study sickness in industrial societies would be tempted to borrow from
sociology. Unfortunately, the tendency has been to borrow from empiricist
(cf "empirical") sociology. It is unfortunate because social anthropology
and empiricist sociology are separated by different premises about their
facts. In a nutshell, the empiricist works an epistemology-free social science.
He supposes that his language and techniques, once they have been suitably
refined, uncover facts about the world rather than produce them. How is
this different from social anthropology? Seen from one angle, social an
thropology is a science in continuous pursuit of a satisfactory epistemology.
What separates the anthropologist from empiricists is that he regards his
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own concepts and ideas as simultaneously privileged and a part of a cultural

system. That is to say, he thinks of his ideas as being suitable for interpreting
other peoples' beliefs about the world but, at the same time, knows that his
ideas, like the beliefs they are intended to interpret, are products of particu
lar historical and social determinants. The mere fact that he can justify his
ideas to the satisfaction of other anthropologists and social scientists or that
they seem reasonable to his educated countrymen does not remove them
from his scrutiny (181). The anthropologist's willingness to scrutinize his
own concepts as a cultural system, to want to know and justify his own
context of belief, helps explain both the vitality of anthropological discourse

and its "failure" to get beyond what Thomas Kuhn called the preparadigm
stage of science.
Given anthropology's cross-cultural field, can it be otherwise? It can
when medical anthropoligists incorrectly suppose that epistemological
questions are limited to the task of interpreting non-Western belief systems
and the field of "ethnomedical" inquiry [an inquiry which ostensibly focuses
on beliefs and practices "not explicitly derived from the conceptual frame
work of modern (allopathic) medicine" (75, p. 99)]. When this happens, and
epistemological scrutiny is suspended for Western social science and West
ern medicine, empiricist-leaning anthropologists are free to adopt, as part
of their own conceptual apparatus, the conventional wisdom of the domi
nant medical culture of their society. I am thinking of concepts such as
"stressful life events," "coping mechanisms," "life styles," and "socioeco
nomic status," which, having been raised out of the culture of the middle
classes into the halls of science by empiricist sociology and social psy
chology, desocialize sickness and the social scientist's knowledge of sick
ness. Desocializing concepts work by displacing the historical, political, and
economic determinants of sickness. In place of social determinants, now
reduced to ghostly "situational variable,s�' and "attributes," empiricists es
tablish the primacy of the individual and his values, motives, dispositions,
and perceptions.
The danger in empiricist social science is that, having fragmented the
social relations of sickness particular to Western society, social scientists
will help to reproduce these same social relations (180). For example, Foster
and Anderson, in their book Medical Anthropology (51), describe the
United States as a "complex society, with multiple life choices" (51, p. 196,
in the course of a discussion of careers in nursing). In this society, they
write, disproportionately few physicians come from "lower socioeconomic
levels," because lower socioeconomic parents are unable to sustain the urges
and ambitions of those of their children who initially want to be doctors
[(51, p. 178) citing (66)]. Writing about regions of the world undergoing
rapid change, Foster and Anderson attribute "the diseases of civilization"
to the tendency of people to adopt health destructive practices, such as

excessive use of alcohol, and "just plain unhealthy personal life styles" (51,
p. 124). Multiple life choices? Lower socioeconomic levels? Diseases of
civilization? Of course. But life choices are not randomly distributed in our
complex society, nor are the diseases of civilization randomly distributed
in less developed countries. Through some mechanism, people at a "lower"
level get mainly wretched choices, such as choosing to work where they will
be exposed to toxic substances and choosing to be periodically unemployed
or chronically underemployed. And this same mechanism distributes to a
"higher" level a large number of generally more healthful choices. The two
sets of choices do not merely co-occur: each helps to determine the other
(cf 51, pp. 21-22). That Foster and Anderson ignore the social relations of
sickness is consistent with a position Foster takes in an earlier article, where
he refers to the "medical behavioral science specializations" of medical
anthropology and medical sociology (50). Anthropologists, he writes, study
ethnicity and cultural affiliation, beliefs and practices, values and premises,
while subjects such as class and economic differences, and professions and
professionalization belong to sociologists.
Allow me to summarize what I have written up to this point. I began by
calling attention to the rapid growth of research, writing, and professional
activity in medical anthropology over the last decade. To understand these
developments, I wrote, it is necessary to know the various incentives an
thropologists have had for entering this field and the three options they have
had for responding to these inducements: they have had to rely on either
(a) conceptual systems originally intended for describing and analyzing
other phenomenological domains (such as ritual behavior), (b) methodolo
gies and conceptualizations borrowed from empiricist medical sociology, or
( c ) an evolving conceptual system centered on the social and experiential
particularities of sickness and healing. Finally, I described the limitations
of options (a ) and (b). The rest of this review is about (c).
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ILLNESS
A good place to begin is with Frake's paper, "The Diagnosis of Disease

among the Subanum of Mindanao" (52). In this paper, Frake set out five
propositions: 1. People depend on cognitive structures to organize their
behavior and make their decisions. The cognitive structure of sickness is
implicit in utterances which can be elicited from informants by means of
standardized questions (e.g. "What kind of illness is that?"). 2. In the case
of the Subanum, knowledge of skin diseases is structured by means of a
taxonomy, so that each term is distinguished from any other term by at least
one unshared attribute or by a different degree of specificity (i.e. by horizon-
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tal or vertical contrasts in a taxonomic hierarchy).3. Although people may

disagree about what name to give some actual symptom or set of symptoms,
disagreement occurs within the shared taxonomy. 4. Disagreements occur
because taxonomic categories are discontinuous but disease and nature are
continuous. Disagreements also result from "social role contingencies" (e.g.
a speaker's desire to avoid putting his own symptoms into a stigmatizing
pigeonhole), dialect variations, and the proclivities of taxonomic hairsplit
ters. 5. There are no essential differences between the ways in which people
organize sickness and other phenomenological domains such as botany.
Frake's paper is a famous example of the formal analysis of ethnographic

data, but it belongs to the prehistory of medical anthropology.Sickness, for
Frake, is a vehicle for pursuing other interests. I begin with his paper so
that we can have a point of reference from which to follow the trajectory
of a group of anthropologists, identified with the explanatory model of
illness approach, whose work does depart in a distinctive way from earlier
understandings of sickness. [In a moment, we shall see that explanatory
model writers believe that Frake's sort of analysis has only very limited
relevance for studying sickness. Not all medical anthropologists share this
opinion, however (e.g. 86). In addition, several writers have recently
proposed formal models for analyzing how decisions are made during sick
ness episodes (30, 184, 185).]
A key argument in the explanatory model approach first appeared in a
1977 article by Byron Good, titled, "The Heart of What's the Matter" (61).
He elaborated this in a second paper (62), written together with Mary-jo
Good. Like Frake, Good stresses the importance of language. Human
illness, he writes, "is fundamentally semantic or meaningful and ... all
clinical practice is inherently interpretive .. ." (62, p. 175). But there are
fundamental differences between Frake and Good regarding how the lan
guage of sickness ought to be interpreted. Frake's philosophy of language
is the formalist tradition of anthropological semantics, associated with
writers such as Ward Goodenough. Good's sources, on the other hand, are
writers on the anthropology of ritual and symbol, notably Victor Turner,
and contemporary hermeneutic philosophers, among whom he cites Hans
Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Good rejects Frake's positions 2 and 3,
and argues that a sickness term is not equivalent to a set of defining symp
toms, nor is it a "neatly bounded 'category', defined primarily in distinction
to other categories." According to Good, each term has a distinctive config
uration of meanings, but there are overlapping associational patterns among
terms (61, p. 40). He also rejects Frake's positions 4 and 5, on the grounds
that sickness terms must be understood in the context of being sick, where
"an illness or symptom condenses a network of meanings for the suffer
er . . . " (62, p. 76). To argue otherwise, as Frake does in proposition 1, "di-
rects our attention away from the social and symbolic context which gives
an illness category its distinctive semantic configuration" (61, p. 38).
Good uses the term semantic illness network to label the "network of
words, situations, symptoms and feelings which are associated with an
illness and give it meaning for the sufferer" (61, p. 40). Good's case studies
come from a Turkic-speaking region of Iran (61) and an out-patient clinic
in the United States (62), and they are mainly about chronic complaints.
For each of his case studies, Good followed the same procedure. Over a
period of months, he collected information about symptoms, choice of
therapies, social situation, and the etiological circumstances his informant
reported to him; special attention was given to how social and situational
changes affected the illness's semantic configuration during this time.Good
describes his methodology as a kind of "social free association" which

enabled him to gain entry to the distinctive reality apprehended by infor
mants (6 1, p. 39, 62, p. 168). In this way, he reconstructed his informant's
semantic illness network. [See Bibeau's elaboration of this scheme (12).]
In his analysis of Iranian semantic illness networks, Good introduced the
notion that networks are organized through core symbolic elements. The
Iranian's heart and heart distress are described as core symbols in this
paper. Good's idea of core symbols closely parallels Turner's notion that
there are "dominant symbols" which organize the meanings of rituals in
preindustrial societies (161; 162, chap. 6). Like dominant ritual symbols,
core symbols are polysemic in the sense of linking up with different symbolic
domains, and this explains why semantic illness networks include such
heterogeneous elements. Good describes an Iranian case study in which the
core symbol links up childbirth, miscarriage, pregnancy, blood, pollution,
weakness, menstruation, oral contraceptives, infertility, loss of vitality, old
age, sorrow and sadness. In another case study, heart distress connects a
different, but overlapping, configuration: old age, sorrow and sadness, ritual
mourning, worries about poverty, anxiety, interpersonal problems with
particular relatives, nerves, madness, and blood problems. Like dominant
ritual symbols, core symbols link ideological elements (especially values
linked to normative behavior) to emotional-physical ones in such a way that
the semantic illness network develops a degree of unity in spite of its
complexity and heterogeneity. Within the semantic illness network, core
symbols form "a symbolic pathway which links the values and aspirations
of purposive interaction, the stresses, shames and disappointments of social
contingencies, and the affective and ultimately physiological elements of the
personal" (61, p. 39; 90, p. 209). [For other analyses of core symbols in
sickness, see ( 132, 133).]
Semantic illness networks are also described in the work of Blumhagen
and Kleinman. Blumhagen's article (13) is about how hypertension is per-
264 YOUNG
ceived by a population of Americans who suffer from this disease. It would

be interesting to compare the descriptions given by Blumhagen's informants
with the accounts of Good's Iranians, since the physical location of their
core symbols is similar, i.e. the circulatory system, while their semantic
configurations are very different, of course. Unfortunately, it is difficult to
make the comparison because Blumhagen's approach to semantic illness
networks departs from Good's in important ways. First, Blumhagen col
lected his data from a relatively large number of people, 105 clients of
a Veterans Administration hospital. Each semantic illness network was
constructed on the basis of a single interview, using an open-ended

questionnaire. Second, Blumhagen organized his informants' responses
into what he calls "nodes" and "arrows." Nodes consist of reports of

symptoms (e.g. dizzy spells), interaction (e.g. family arguments), physi
ological functions (e.g. ballooning veins), body states (e.g. overweight),
pathogenic agencies (e.g. acute stress), and activities (e.g. smoking, eating
salt). Arrows identify causal relations between nodes (e.g. high pressure
causes ballooning veins which cause ruptured blood vessels). Blumhagen
reduced 1300 individual reports (nodes) to 59 categories, and redrew
his arrows to indicate the relative frequency with which his informants
reported causes and effects.
But this is very different from what Good proposed to do. What separates
Good's work from earlier, more traditional, anthropological views of sick
ness is the idea that an informant's statements need to be interpreted in
the context of his illness experience, and close attention needs to be given
to the way his statements change over time in response to his circum
stances. In brief, Good says that semantic illness networks are insepar
able from the idea that illness is an individualized process. Another differ
ence with Blumhagen is that Good takes the more challenging position
that although some of the elements (nodes) in semantic illness networks
are linked by cause and effect, others may be associated in noncausal
ways.
Now for Arthur Kleinman. Kleinman is probably the most influential
and prolific writer in medical anthropology today. In his work, semantic
illness networks have been made part of a comprehensive framework. Be
fore taking up Kleinman's use of semantic networks, however, I want to say
a few words about his framework.
Like Good and Blumhagen, Kleinman rejects the physicalistic reduction
ism of the biomedical model and replaces it with the following scheme:
DISEASE refers to abnormalities in the structure and/or function of
organs and organ systems; pathological states whether or not they are
culturally recognized; the arena of the biomedical model.
ILLNESS refers to a person's perceptions and experiences of certain

socially disvalued states including, but not limited to, disease.
SICKNESS is a blanket term to label events involving disease and/or
illness. According to Kleinman, medical anthropologists need to remem
ber that their domain is sickness, even though their special contribution
will be mainly with regards to illness. [For similar positions, see (34,
42, 43). On the anthropological study of illness and disease, see (4, 46,
81).]
Kleinman's interest in medical beliefs and practices is essentially clinical.
For him, this means concentrating on what he calls the "core clinical
functions," i.e. how systems of medical knowledge and practice enable

people to (a) construct illness as a psychosocial experience; (b) establish
general criteria suitable for guiding the health care seeking process and
assessing the potential efficacy of different treatment approaches; (c) man
aging illness episodes through communicative operations such as labeling
and explaining; (d) providing healing activities (therapeutic intervention,
supportive care); and (e) managing therapeutic outcomes (including
chronic illness and death) (93, pp. 71-72).
The clinical process is, then, a way for individuals to adapt to certain
worrisome circumstances (see also 32, 45). [Kleinman does not believe that
every medical practice is necessarily adaptive in the long run, however (93,
p. 150).] The adaptation premise is reflected in Kleinman's choice of words:
guiding, managing, coping, explaining, negotiating alliances. [For similar
perspectives, see (48, 49, 131, 132).] The premise is also implicit in the
importance he gives to healing in his theoretical and empirical studies.
Although Kleinman does not discuss the term "healing" in detail, he uses
it in a way that allows me to gloss it as a process by which (a) disease and
certain other worrisome circumstances are made into illness (a cultural
construction and therefore meaningful), and (b) the sufferer gains a degree
of satisfaction through the reduction, or even elimination, of the psychologi
cal, sensory, and experiential oppressiveness engendered by his medical
circumstances. Kleinman's conception distinguishes healing from curing in
a way which parallels the difference between illness and disease (see Figure
1). But it is important to recognize that he is distinguishing between culture
and nature, not between mind and body. In Kleinman's work, healing is
not a mentalistic activity, although it is bound to the feelings, perceptions,
and experiences of the individual. So, for example, pharmacodynamic inter
vention and its effects on the body are part of the healing process even when
they are also part of the curingprocess, i.e. the process affecting pathological
organic states. On the other hand, there are occasional instances in which
"the construction (or reordering) of cultural meaning may be all that
266 YOUNG
SIC K N E SS
(
"
no disease
counterpart
.. �
ILL N E SS Healing
DIS E A S E
'- -v
J Curing
no illness
counterpart
Figure 1 The disease-illness approach.
therapy (and efficacy) consists or' [(93, p. 235); see also a detailed treatment
of this issue in (98)]. By asserting the complimentarity of mind and body,
healing and curing, Kleinman and his associates reject the crude Cartesian
ism of the biomedical model of sickness. Other anthropologists, notably
Moerman (121), have moved far beyond this point to argue that efficaCy
needs to be understood in terms of the mind's organically mediated effect
on bodily processes or, put into other words, the effectiveness of healing
upon curing (see also 89). Moerman's radical anti-Cartesianism has been
forcefully criticized by Brody in a way that seems consistent with Klein
man's own premises about sickness (16).
Although Kleinman refers to semantic illness networks in his work,
another notion looms larger. This is the idea that semantic networks are
related to systems of medical knowledge through people's explanatory mod
els of illness, a concept which Kleinman abbreviates as "EM". An EM is
a set of beliefs which "contain any or all of five issues: etiology; onset of
symptoms; pathophysiology; course of sickness (severity and type of sick
role); and treatment" (91, pp. 87-88). At first sight, EM seems to be merely
a label for the idea that every culture has its particular explanations for
sickness. Kleinman is saying more than this, however. First, his EM con
cept resembles Geertz's idea that cultures provide people with ways of
thinking that are simultaneously models of and models for reality (57): EMs
simultaneously create order and meaning, give plans for purposive action,
and help to produce the conditions required for their own perpetuation or
revision. Second, Kleinman attributes EMs to individuals, not cultures.
According to him, EMs are unlikely to be homogeneous even within the
same community. Moreover, a person's EM is likely to alter over time, in
reponse to his particular medical experiences and to the clinical encounters
in which he becomes acquainted with practitioners' EMs. In order to keep
track of these various EMs, Kleinman distinguishes them along one dimen
sion in terms of differences between practitioner EMs and lay EMs; along
a second dimension in terms of how a Western practitioner's Theoretical
or Scientific EM (which he shares with other practitioners; formalized in

printed texts) leads to his Clinical EM (particularized by his clinical experi
ences), and how a layman's Popular EM (shared by a community of lay

men) leads to his Family EM (particularized within a family) and ends up
as his Individual EM; and along a third dimension in which a Clinical EM
or Individual EM passes through its various editions (93, pp. 106-11). In
addition to Kleinman's work on this subject, see Helman's papers (73, 74)
on how Clinical and Individual EMs of "colds," "fevers," and psychotropic
drugs are used and sometimes transformed during clinical transactions; also
see Gaines's paper (56) on the differences he found among the Clinical EMs
of a group of residents in psychiatric medicine.
Now that we know what an EM is, we can return to the issue of semantic
illness networks. In his work, Kleinman refers to both EMs and semantic
illness networks, and he even includes them within a single diagram (93, p.
108). The relation between them is not made clear, however, and there are
points at which they sound very similar: e.g. "Vagueness, multiplicity of
meaning, frequent changes, and lack of sharp boundaries between ideas and
experiences are characteristic of lay EMs" (93, p. 107). In spite of this, there
is a fundamental difference in the ways in which the concepts are used. Most
of the time, Kleinman employs the idea of explanatory models to show how
his informants produce their statements about sickness. EMs emerge in his
writing as sets of propositions or generalizations. Sometimes they are ex
plicit, but often they are tacit, hidden away in bits and pieces in nonmedical
discourses. Also, it seems, EMs are usually about causes and effects, and
it is this quality that makes them useful as models for trying to control and
predict what is going to happen or to give moral significance to what has
already happened. If! am correct, semantic illness networks are the products
of EMs. That is to say, an informant's semantic illness network refers to
a set of statements he actually makes over a given period of time, using EMs
to respond to particular contingencies, e.g. an episode of sickness, an an
thropologist's questions. When, for instance, Good refers to "core symbols"
and describes the Iranian heart as an idiom for expressing emotion in the
268 YOUNG
course of illness, he is referring to a frequently used element in Iranian EMs.

And when Blumhagen uses 105 semantic networks to construct a single
arrangment of nodes and arrows and transforms the indeterminacy of many
links into causes and effects, he seems to be moving from semantic illness
networks (configurations of statements) back towards the Popular EM that
produced them.
The exact relation between an EM and a semantic illness network is
complicated by the fact that an informant's EM may be changing during
the period in which his statements are being made. But the EM idea retains
a degree of ambiguity even after its complex and dynamic character has
been taken into account. One reason for ambiguity is that it is not always
clear how EM writers intend to use the notions. On different occasions,

writers have advocated the EM approach in terms of its (a) analytic impor
tance, as an instrument for studying the healing process and "clinical
transactions" between patients and practitioners; (b) pedagogic impor
tance, as a framework for teaching practitioners the meaning of illness and
the limitations of the biomedical model for clinical practice; and (c) clinical
importance, as an instrument for determining the priorities and concerns
of patients, exploring problems of noncompliance, negotiating therapeutic
alliances with patients (especially when they are ethnically distinct), and
choosing and evaluating treatments and methods for managing therapeutic
outcomes (14, p. 181; 93, chap. 3; 94).
The issue of EM ambiguity aside, it is important to recognize that this
particular combination of claims-analytic, pedagogic, clinical-is intrinsic
to the EM approach. EM advocates justify their efforts to develop this
framework by pointing to its unique practical advantages (pedagogic and
clinical). At the same time, they look at the Western clinic as a place for
transforming theory, Le. a place into which their concepts and methods can
be introduced, tested, and refined (e.g. 84, 110). Put into other words, the
analytic, pedagogic, and clinical claims of EM advocates are fused through
a praxis orientation.
THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF SICKNESS
While Kleinman and his associates have been establishing the EM ap
proach, other anthropologists have developed a position which gives
primacy to the social relations which produce the forms and distribution
of sickness in society. It would be going too far to say that these writings
present a unified view of sickness, paralleling the work of EM writers.
However, it is possible to see in their work the start of a rival approach,
rooted in diverse sources but especially indebted to Evans-Pritchard's anal
ysis of Zande medicine (40), Gluckman's study of the social organization
of ritual behavior (e.g. 60), various Marxist writers, and Michel Foucault.
In the next pages, I am going to describe this social relations of sickness
view by comparing it with the EM approach. The latter sets out in a clear
fashion many of the fundamental issues in which a distinctive medical
anthropology will be built: the distinction between disease, illness, sickness;
the connection between sickness and people's statements about sickness;
and the practical (e.g. clinical) role of medical anthropology. For this
reason, comparisons with the EM approach are an expedient way to show
what these other writers have in common. Moreover, some of these writers
are arguing explicitly against the premises of the EM approach.
Sickness and Healing

We begin with the juxtaposition of disease and illness in the EM approach.

It will be recalled that EM writers adopted this disease-illness scheme as
an alternative to what they saw as the Cartesian dualism of the biomedical
view, i.e. in reaction to the view in which disease = sickness and the
consciousness of the patient is bracketed out. The usefulness of the scheme
has been challenged by Frankenberg (53) and myself (176, 181). In our
separate articles, we argue that while the biomedical and disease-illness
views clash in one respect, i.e. over the issue of physicalistic reductionism,
they resemble each other in another, equally important way. Specifically,
both views take the individual as their object and the arena of significant
events. The point is that the disease-illness view does not require writers to
give an account of the ways in which social relations shape and distribute
sickness. In this respect, it is not so different from the biomedical model as
its advocates seem to believe.
From a distance, this appears to be an unfair criticism, since Kleinman
makes several references to social determinants of medical behavior in his
monograph on Chinese medicine (93, pp. 24, 202, 288-89) and Good, too,
mentions the importance of relations of power in medical practice. But the
fact is that neither Kleinman nor Good actually undertakes such an analysis
in his own work. What is more to the point, their scheme gives them no
compelling reason to make this analysis. Look at it from their point of view:
(a) their theoretical interests focus on clinical events and the healing (ill
ness) process; (b) looking outward from the clinical setting, social relations
can be seen to radiate dyadically, i.e. between patient and practitioner,
patient and individual family members, and so on; and (c) while there are
social factors that lie outside this circle, they can be deferred indefinitely
without seriously affecting our ability to study the healing process.
According to its critics, there are two problems with the EM view. First,
it overlooks the fact that power originates and resides in arrangements
between social groups and between classes. Power is merely manifested in
270 YOUNG
interpersonal relations, and for this reason a focus on dyadic relations

fragments and desocializes the true nature of power (180). Second, the path
followed by EM writers seems reasonable only because there is a term
missing from the disease-illness scheme on which their work is based. To
understand this criticism, it is necessary to see how the disease-illness
scheme is rewritten by Frankenberg and myself:
DISEASE retains its original meaning (organic pathologies and abnor
malities).
ILLNESS is essentially the same, referring to how disease and sickness
are brought into the individual consciousness.
SICKNESS is no longer a blanket term referring to disease and/or illness.

Sickness is redefined as the process through which worrisome behavioral
and biological signs, particularly ones originating in disease, are given

socially recognizable meanings, i.e. they are made into symptoms and so
cially significant outcomes. Every culture has rules for translating signs into
symptoms, for linking symptomatologies to etiologies and interventions,
and for using the evidence provided by interventions to confirm translations
and legitimize outcomes (24, 117, l 30). The path a person follows from
translation to socially significant outcome constitutes his sickness.
Sickness is, then, a processfor socializing disease and illness. For example:
1. In "pluralistic" medical systems, a single set of signs can designate
more than one sickness (137, 138), and social forces help to determine
which people get which sicknesses. This happens, for instance, when a
particular set of signs can be referred to different kinds of diagnostician
therapists, but the sickness domains of the different practitioners do not
overlap (they each own a distinctive set of etiologies and proofs), and the
services of the different practitioners are not equally accessible to all sectors
of the patient population. In this case, disease and illness are socialized
through the arrangements which determine who gets what practitioners and
interventions (55, 68, 129, 173, 174).
2. In Western society, the right to translate signs into socially important
symptoms is dominated by a single kind of practitioner and a more or less
unified set of etiologies. But here, too, social forces determine that individu
als with the same set of signs are sometimes allocated different sicknesses.
This is clear, for example, if we compare clinical events which are organized
through practitioner-client relations (e.g. the physician is paid through a
fee-for-service arrangement, and the patient is his client) with clinical events
which are organized in terms of practitioner-patron relations [e.g. the physi
cian receives a salary and a position in a bureaucratic career structure, so
that his employer is also his patron (29, 82)]. Another example occurs when
translations and etiologies are publicly contested and resolved through legal
rather than medical means [e.g. diseases of the workplace, such as Brown
Lung (6)]. More commonly, though, the social relations of sickness in
Western society take a form in which the same sickness (translation) leads
to different illnesses and different cures according to the sufferers' particular
economic and social position.
3. Symbols of healing are simultaneously symbols of power. Specific
views of the social order are embedded in medical beliefs, where they are
often encoded in etiologies and beliefs about the sources of healing power
(25,26,156). These ideological views are brought into the consciousness of
individuals in the ceremony, dramaturgy, and demonstrations of efficacy
that make up healing practices. In other words,medical practices are simul
taneously ideological practices when they justify ( a) the social arrange
ments through which disease,healing,and curing are distributed in society

(e.g. 124), and (b) the social consequences of sickness (e.g. the patient's
liability for disease he contracts in the workplace).

Just one more point in this connection. Earlier I wrote that when EM
writers tum to clinical events they adopt the premise that descriptions and
analyses of medical practices should focus on their adaptive functions.
[Some anthropologists have adopted a stronger, and probably tautologous,
version of this premise: the fact that people choose to perpetuate a particular
medical practice is evidence that it is adaptive, as a form of healing if not
necessarily curing (4).] This issue is complicated by the fact that some
societies,e.g. the Japanese according to Lock (112, 113),themselves under
line the putatively adaptive function of their medical practices. This premise
entails problems when writers see adaptation mainly from the point of view
of the sufferer and so neglect the fact that many medical practices develop
and persist because they are useful for other people and for reasons uncon
nected with curing and healing. For example, Strong (155) calls attention
to the ways in which physicians employ certain clinical practices to control
the emotionality of their clients and themselves,and to control the agendas
and lengths of clinical sessions (see also 22,23). The most important prob
lem,though,is that the adaptation premise marginalizes the fact that sick
ness rather than illness determines the choice and form of many clinical
interventions, transactions, etc. In other words, people are sometimes
forced into sicknesses that make their situations more difficult for them
(173). The fact that patients are liable to interpret such socially determined
events in "adaptive" ways (i.e. give them self-serving and self-preserving
meanings) is not especially interesting, nor is it a distinctive feature of
medical situations (153).
Forms of Medical Knowledge

EM writers are correct when they say that informants' statements about
sickness are complex and often ambiguous. They are right, too,to say that
the anthropologist's job is to search for the inner logic of these statements,
i.e. the reasoning which connects perceptions, beliefs, knowledge, action,
272 YOUNG
and reflection. But have EM writers drawn the correct conclusions from
their own observations? They have pointed out that statements are complex
and ambiguous, but can they explain why this situation should have come
about in the first place?
In recent papers (182, 183), I criticize EM writers for trying to explain
the surface meaning of informants' statements in terms of a single set of
underlying cognitive structures, i.e. explanatory models of illness. Infor
mants' statements seem complex, I argue, because they often juxtapose
different kinds of knowledge (159, 188, 189). A speaker does not necessarily
know all of his facts in the same way, and he often gives different, epistemo
logically distinctive, accounts of his sickness at the same time.

One of my papers (182) outlines a scheme for identifying the different

kinds of medical knowledge that appear in people's statements. The scheme
describes 1. theoretical knowledge, which organizes discrete events, experi
ences, etc. into classes (e.g. "This is a case of influenza"); 2. knowledge of
events etc. in terms of their empirical particularities; 3. knowledge rendered
existentially coherent with the thinker's previous experiences, his assump
tions about human nature, man's fate, etc; 4. knowledge which the speaker
has transformed in order to make it intelligible to other people; and 5.
knowledge he has produced by negotiating meanings with other people.
This scheme is not a typology, since each form of knowledge-theoretical,
empirical, etc-is a distinctive account which emerges in a process of
knowledge production that the thinker is continually undertaking, as he
responds first to one contingency and later to another (e.g. choosing effica
cious therapies, giving socially acceptable accounts of his behavior). Within
this production process, the different forms are linked dialectically so that
over time they are continually transforming one another. Thus, no one form
is, a priori, the speaker's authentic knowledge of medical events, and no
single set of cognitive structures can be said to be the ultimate source of the
surface meaning of his statements.
In this scheme, explanatory models of illness are only one of several
possible forms of theoretical knowledge. This explains why EM writers are
incorrect if they assume that explanatory models are necessarily implicit in
all of the statements an informant makes about sickness (101, 177). The
scheme describes two other forms of knowledge that, like explanatory
models, shape people's understanding of sickness, determine their state
ments, affect their motives, etc. These are "prototypes" and "chain com
plexes," concepts borrowed from Hallpike and Vygotsky (67, 166: see
Figure 2).
People use prototypes just as they would employ an EM, to organize the
events and circumstances they are experiencing. Although they are both
forms of theoretical knowledge, prototypes and EMs are dissimilar in im-
{
Chain Complexes � EMs

kinds
Prototypes of medical
accounts
Other forms
empirical theoretical
I, ,I
{
kinds
of medical
r I
knowledge
negotiated intersubjective eXistential
. Figure 2 Kinds of medical knowledge and accounts.
portant ways. An EM, it will be recalled, consists of strongly causal proposi

tions, and this is a reason that EMs are so important for medical practices
and thinking: they enable people to formulate plans of action. Further, EMs
are generally shared by relatively large numbers of people. A prototype, on
the other hand, is never more than a string of events and circumstances
recalled from the past, usually from an earlier sickness episode. Its elements
(symptoms, sensations, outcomes, etc) are connected as causes and effects,
but more often they are associated by simple contiguity, chronology, and
resemblance. Further, a prototype is characteristically limited to either a
small circle of people (a family for instance) or the thinker alone (cf Clinical,
Family, and Individual EMs, which are dialects of widely known Scientific
and Popular Ems). Because prototypes are neither widely shared nor
strongly causal, they are difficult to incorporate into diagnostic and thera
peutic practices, at least in large scale societies where internalizing and
desocializing medical belief systems dominate people's practices (176). For
these reasons, the contents of a prototype are relatively unstable, and ele
ments are likely to be simplified, lost, or transformed as time goes by. Chain
complexes are superficially similar to prototypes: they, too, are often
acausal, limited to small numbers of people, unstable. But whereas proto
types are a form of theoretical knowledge and an instrument for analogical
reasoning, chain complexes stand only for themselves. They are products
of experience (and possibly unconscious forces): simply strings of empirical
events, sensations, symptoms, etc which cohere and persist in the mind
because of the salience, contiguity, and chronology of the individual ele
ments in the life of the thinker.
There are two reasons why anthropologists should want to be able to
recognize prototypes and chain complexes. First, they explain why some
274 YOUNG
statements about sickness seem complex and ambiguous: an informants'

statements about sickness are occasionally products of a combination of
loosely connected EMs, prototypical experiences, and chain complexes (see
183 for an illustration). Second, people occasionally use prototypes and
chain complexes to express dimensions of sickness which are excluded by
EMs. In Western society, for example, people sometimes use prototypes and
chain complexes to give accounts of sickness in social and biographical
terms. Taussig describes this use in an article (157) based on his conversa
tions with a woman repeatedly hospitalized for degenerative and chronic
ailments. Taussig, a physician-anthropologist, characterizes this patient's

relations with physicians and nurses as alternating between "alienated pas
sivity and alienated self-assertion," a pattern, he claims, which is often

observed among hospitalized patients. As Taussig describes this case, the
woman's passivity is a product of the practitioner's Clinical EM and her
own, complementary, Individual EM. These EMs, and the practices and
ceremonies through which the hospital staff materialize them, reduce the
facts of her sickness to a case of intrasomatic betrayal, and transform her
from being the subject of her history into a passive object of an ostensibly
benevolent medical science. On the other hand, her outbursts of aggressive,
purposeless, and sometimes violent self-assertion originate first in her
knowledge of a chain complex of socially and economically determined
events and circumstances that pushed her along the path of misfortune and
hospitalization, and second, in her knowledge of her sickness as a prototype
of the medical events which now seem to be overcoming her own daughter
and granddaughter also. In Taussig's account, chain complex and prototype
are the idiosyncratic, inchoate, and frustrating counterpoint to the powerful
desocializing accounts produced by Clinical and Individual EMs. They are
merely facts without a discourse.
In Taussig'S case, conventional medical practices marginalized his pa
tient's prototypical and chain complex accounts of sickness. What happens
in tribal societies, though, where medical beliefs are socialized and the sick
person's widest social group is a small-scale society? An excellent account
by Sindzingre and Zempleni takes up this question regarding the Senufo of
the Ivory Coast (149). After establishing the point that the Senufo produce
heterogeneous medical facts and accounts, Sindzingre and Zempleni de
scribe how Senufo divination-diagnosis actively incorporates prototypes
and chain complexes. Here, contemporary sickness events are conceived as
the reactivation of earlier events and they are "reinserted and stored in the
collective memory of the matrilineage; . . . the divinatory device has the
function of feeding this memory with its proper constituent instances and
recollections . . . " (149, p. 279).
Medicine as an Ideological Practice

In his article, Taussig (157) adopts a position, originating with Georg
Lukacs, that in Western society the commodity mode of production domi
nates the social order and creates a situation in which human beings and
their experiences are constructed as dehistoricized objects-in-themselves.
Taussig'S point is that Western medicine is, among other things, part of the
ideological apparatus of this social order. Its practices are ideological prac
tices because they produce evidence for the view that society is merely the
sum total of its constituent individuals and that social forces are nothing
more than the equilibrium which arises from the multitude of these separate
wills and fates. Scientific and Clinical EMs, and the practices and ceremo
nies which they legitimize, achieve an ideological effect by reifying signs,

experiences, and outcomes as desocialized facts of nature. Taussig compares
this situation with what happens in tribal societies, such as among the
Azande, where medical facts "are not separated from values, physical mani
festations are not torn from their social contexts, and it requires . . . no great
effort of mind to read social relations into material events."
According to Taussig, it is no accident that sickness has become a focus
for ideological practice. Serious sickness interrupts everyday routine and
the more or less uncritical acceptance of life. It turns people "into meta
physicians and philosophers," pondering questions such as "Why me?"
Thus, when sickness is brought into the clinic, the practitioner is given "a
powerful point of entry into the patient's psyche," through the authority of
his EMs. It is at this point that the Western clinician becomes the agent of
entrenched class interests, medicine becomes a means of social control, and
the body is transformed into an instrument for ratifying socially engendered
categories and "fabulating reality." By denying the social relations embod
ied in sickness, these practitioners turn clinical medicine into "a science of
(apparently) 'real things', " and transmogrify reality into a "world of a
priori objects beholden only to their own forces and laws dutifully illumi
nated for us by professional experts such as doctors." In this way, a political
message is transmitted within the clinic itself: "Don't contemplate rebellion
against the facts of life for these are . . . irretrievably locked in the realm
of physical matter."
In the United States, the success of ideological practices such as clinical
medicine lies not in their capacity to confront and refute rival views, but
in the power to push these views to the margins of reasoned discourse.
Through these practices, socialized knowledge of medicine is made to seem
not so much "wrong" or "counter-productive" (which would at least sug
gest some common ground between conventional and socialized views) as
"not medicine at all" or an attempt to "politicize" medicine and science.
276 YOUNG
This is the point at which Taussig turns his critical remarks to EM writers. .
According to Taussig, the EM approach subverts the possibility of a social
ized medicine. While the EM approach claims to give the patient's defini
tion of the problem a privileged place in the medical dialogue, its real effect
is to reduce the social relations of sickness to a discourse on illness and
adaptation. The EM approach becomes an instrument for co-opting and
then subordinating the patient's definition, for leaving his socialized knowl
edge out in the cold in the form of prototypes and chain complexes, and
for wresting control out of his hands.
There are several points in his argument where Taussig sidesteps impor
tant issues. First, there is a problem which is signified by his reference to

the Azande. In spite of what Taussig implies, Zande medical divination

diagnosis seems to have functioned as a powerful ideological and quasi
juridical instrument through which an aristocratic stratum dominated the
mass of commoners. While it is true that Zande medicine did socialize
sickness, the main political effect of this was to divide nonaristocrats against
each other and to ensure their common exploitation (120). Second, it
is not clear exactly what Taussig means by "reification," since he does
not distinguish this concept from forms of objectification which seem to be
inevitable, namely the symbolic processes through which people objec
tify themselves in particular events, material things, and social relations,
and which help constitute the cultural construction of reality in every
society.
Are Taussig's problems more apparent than real? After all, he seems to
be implying that (a) objectification is "reification" when it mystifies the
social origins of disease, the social determinants of sickness, and the linea
ments of class domination, and (b) when symptoms, etiologies, etc are
authentically socialized (de-reified) they are instruments for demystifying
disease, illness, and the social order, and this is true in spite of the fact that
in some tribal and traditional societies they are socialized in ways which
contribute to structures of domination. But this line of reasoning would lead
to another question. How can Taussig or any anthropologist be sure that
his own ideas about sickness are correctly demystified, that he is not merely
mystifying the social relations of sickness through an idiom of "society"
rather than in the conventional way, through "nature" (175)? And this is
Taussig's problem. He uses Lukacs's argument about reification to justify
his own claim that he can correctly socialize (demystify) sickness. But
Lukacs based his argument on highly problematic claims about history,
class consciousness, and the emancipatory role of the proletariat (87, chap.
8). Perhaps Taussig could win us over to these claims and perhaps not. The
point is that they are tacit and unargued in his article. The result is that his
analysis of how Western medicine mystifies sickness is both convincing and

important, but his own epistemological claims are problematic.
A recent article of mine (180) parallels Taussig's paper up to a point. It
departs from his thesis by arguing that all knowledge of society and sick
ness is socially determined, and that anthropologists cannot legitimately
claim access to demystified facts. What they can claim, and what would set
their accounts of sickness off from those of others, is a critical under
standing of how medical facts are predetermined by the processes through
which they are conventionally produced in clinics, research settings, etc.
Thus, the task at hand is not simply to demystify knowledge, but to criti
cally examine the social conditions of knowledge production. The article

itself analyzes how stress researchers produce their characteristic facts
about sickness outcomes. Like proponents of the disease-illness model,

stress researchers promise to move knowledge of sickness beyond the limita
tions of the biomedical perspective, but in the end they, too, use sickness
to show that socially determined ideas about society (its reducibility to
individuals and dyads of individuals, etc) are irresistible facts of nature. In
stress research medical knowledge is desocialized through a labor process
which (a ) recapitulates the social relations of production which are charac
teristic of the general economy (e.g. separating the intellectual labor of the
project manager from the fragmented and mechanical labor of his infor
mants), and (b) displaces the human subject (i.e. the people about whom
stress researchers are writing) into an individualistic zone of anxiety, the
milieu of "stressful life events," where he is reconstituted as a psychological
abstraction. [In this connection, see analogous arguments by Navarro (126)
and Assennato & Navarro (7, pp. 224--30) on the social production of
knowledge of occupational medicine, and Latour & Woolgar (102) on the
social production of biomedical knowledge.]
Efficacy and Productivity

What is the importance of medical anthropological research for the people
about whom medical anthropologists write? EM writers are quite clear on
this point: their practical interest is in the issue of medical efficacy. That
is, they want to augment the effectiveness of clinical medicine in the context
of the healing process. For example, they want to enhance patient educa
tion, remedy problems of noncompliance, and challenge maladaptive
courses of treatment. On the other hand, the writers I have identified with
the anthropology of sickness perspective are oriented to a point beyond the
healing process, the inner logic of illness, and the consciousness of the
individual. Their practical interest is in what can be called medical produc-
278 YOUNG
tivity. That is, they want to identify the direct and indirect impact of
particular clinical practices and perspectives on the levels of morbidity and
mortality of the population at large. Among other things, this means that
they want to learn whether particular clinical practices, just because they
are efficacious, also help to determine who is exposed to which pathogens
and pathogenic situations, and who controls or has access to which medical
practices and resources.
Because a medical system's degree of productivity depends on the effec
tiveness of its armamentarium and the technical skills and knowledge of its
practitioners, it is impossible to talk about productivity without also intro
ducing questions about efficacy. The reverse is not true, however, and this
tends to limit the practical importance of efficacy centered approaches, since

there are at least three situations in which improvements in efficacy have
little or no positive effect, i.e. they are unproductive. 1. Improvements in
efficacy are restricted to a small number of people and have a negligible
effect on levels of morbidity and mortality for the total population for which
they could make a difference. In a similar situation, improvements in effi
cacy are made available to the population for which they could make a
difference, but this means diverting resources needed for improving the
health of a larger segment of the total population. For example, this is the
situation in some less developed countries where the capital absorbing
medical interventions demanded by urban elites siphon resources away
from the primary health care needs of a much larger (poorer, rural) at-risk
population. The net effect is no change, or even an increase, in overall levels
of morbidity and mortality. Situations of this sort are described by Djurfeldt
& Lindberg (31), writing about the introduction of Western medicine into
a region of Tamil Nadu State (India), and by Frankenberg & Leeson (54),
writing about the development of a physician centered medical system in
Zambia (see also 28, 1 79). 2. Improvements are made available to the
population at large, but they are efficacious only under carefully regulated
conditions. In actual practice, the social relations of sickness make them
either iatrogenic or wasteful, e.g. the unregulated dispensing of powerful
antibiotics in less developed contries (47). 3. There are situations in which
the main effect of improvements in efficacy is to justify the "reification" or
desocialization of sickness. As we have seen, this happens when efficacious
practices give evidence, in the form of individual cases of curing and heal
ing, that desocialized views of sickness merely reflect the facts of nature. But
desocialization is intrinsically unproductive because it hides the underlying
social determinants of patterns of morbidity and mortality and, in this way,
helps to reproduce them. (Taussig's claim is that even if the EM approach
were used efficaciously, it would probably fall into the second and third
situations.)
CONCLUSION
The following outline schematizes my view of medical anthropology's field.

THE ANTHROPOLOGIES OF ILLNESS AND SICKNESS
I. Biological Orientations
A. Biomedicine
B. Anthropology of disease (Biological anthropology)
II. Sociocultural Orientations
A. Empiricist epistemologies
i. Medical sociology
ii. Empiricist medical anthropology
B. Nonempiricist epistemologies
i. Traditional anthropological approaches
ii. Anthropology of illness
iii. Anthropology of sickness
This outline points us in the direction of a last question. Are the anthropolo
gies of illness and sickness bracketed together in complementary or antago
nistic ways? The answer depends on one's point of view.
Anthropologists of illness appear inclined to see the development of an
anthropology of sickness as evidence of an emerging intellectual division of
labor within medical anthropology. For example, this view is implicit in the
way Kleinman treats the social relations of sickness in his monograph on
Chinese medicine (93). Several times he mentions the importance of recog
nizing the social and economic determinants of clinical events. At the same
time, he postpones the task of actually describing and analyzing these
determinants. Thus, he implies that while knowledge of illness does not
depend on knowledge of its social conditions, the former will probably be
enriched by the latter.
The view from the anthropology o/sickness is more complicated. On the
one hand, writers like Taussig raise the question of whether there is a shared
epistemology between the anthropologies of illness and sickness. If there is
not, then the relation between the two is antagonistic and predicated on
rival claims to the truth. On the other hand, there are writers, including
myself, who stop short of this conclusion and recognize the common ground
of the anthropologies of illness and sickness.
What all of the anthropologists of sickness share is the premise that social
forces and relations permeate medical anthropology's field. When these
social conditions are ignored or deferred, knowledge of medical events,
including what happens in the clinic, is distorted. [For other approaches to
this subject, see Janzen's distinction between microanalysis and macroan
alysis (78), and Press's typology of medical systems (138).] What is more,
280 YOUNG
the anthropologist's knowledge is distorted in ways which are themselves

socially significant. The underlying argument here is that the key concepts
of the anthropology of illness-i.e. healing, illness, efficacy, explanatory
models, and semantic illness networks-cannot be understood merely in
relation to each other. By themselves, the concepts do not constitute a
system for describing other people's medical beliefs, experiences, events,
and behavior, because 1. illness is, among other things, a means through
which tacit knowledge of the human subject (including his knowledge of his
capacity to know, influence, or change the conditions of sickness) enters into
the consciousness of the individual; 2. healing, in addition to bringing

satisfaction to sufferers, is also an ideological practice which helps to re
produce the social relations through which illness is made real and both
illness and disease are distributed in society; 3. efficacy is practically impor
tant because of the socially determined contribution it makes to productiv
ity; and 4. explanatory models, semantic illness networks, together with
prototypical episodes and chain complexes, are dialectically related ele
ments within a socially determined process of knowledge production.
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ANNUAL

Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University,

Cleveland, Ohio 44106

Medical anthropology, as a field of research, writing, and professional

Curare (Wiesbaden). Finally, there is a long list of publications which are

programs in medical anthropology, three-quarters of these at the doctoral

describe medical beliefs and practices by using conceptual systems which

Rather, we talk about them as belonging to the anthropologies of religion,

comparative modes of thinking, witchcraft, ritual and symbol, culture and

own concepts and ideas as simultaneously privileged and a part of a cultural

context of belief, helps explain both the vitality of anthropological discourse

to the tendency of people to adopt health destructive practices, such as

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ILLNESS

A good place to begin is with Frake's paper, "The Diagnosis of Disease

tal or vertical contrasts in a taxonomic hierarchy).3. Although people may

Frake's paper is a famous example of the formal analysis of ethnographic

describes his methodology as a kind of "social free association" which

ceived by a population of Americans who suffer from this disease. It would

constructed on the basis of a single interview, using an open-ended

into what he calls "nodes" and "arrows." Nodes consist of reports of

ILLNESS refers to a person's perceptions and experiences of certain

functions," i.e. how systems of medical knowledge and practice enable

Figure 1 The disease-illness approach.

or Scientific EM (which he shares with other practitioners; formalized in

ences), and how a layman's Popular EM (shared by a community of lay­

course of illness, he is referring to a frequently used element in Iranian EMs.

clear how EM writers intend to use the notions. On different occasions,

THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF SICKNESS

Sickness and Healing

We begin with the juxtaposition of disease and illness in the EM approach.

interpersonal relations, and for this reason a focus on dyadic relations

SICKNESS is no longer a blanket term referring to disease and/or illness.

and biological signs, particularly ones originating in disease, are given

ments through which disease,healing,and curing are distributed in society

liability for disease he contracts in the workplace).

Forms of Medical Knowledge

logically distinctive, accounts of his sickness at the same time.

One of my papers (182) outlines a scheme for identifying the different

Chain Complexes � EMs

negotiated intersubjective eXistential

. Figure 2 Kinds of medical knowledge and accounts.

portant ways. An EM, it will be recalled, consists of strongly causal proposi­

statements about sickness seem complex and ambiguous: an informants'

ailments. Taussig, a physician-anthropologist, characterizes this patient's

sivity and alienated self-assertion," a pattern, he claims, which is often

Medicine as an Ideological Practice

nies which they legitimize, achieve an ideological effect by reifying signs,

tant issues. First, there is a problem which is signified by his reference to

the Azande. In spite of what Taussig implies, Zande medical divination­

analysis of how Western medicine mystifies sickness is both convincing and

cally examine the social conditions of knowledge production. The article

about sickness outcomes. Like proponents of the disease-illness model,

Efficacy and Productivity

tends to limit the practical importance of efficacy centered approaches, since

The following outline schematizes my view of medical anthropology's field.

the anthropologist's knowledge is distorted in ways which are themselves

the consciousness of the individual; 2. healing, in addition to bringing

Ratshidi of Southern Africa. Am. Eth­ The Hague: Mouton

system. In Anthropological Approaches 74. Heiman, C. G. 1981. "Tonic", "fuel",

ences), and how a layman's Popular EM (shared by a community of lay

portant ways. An EM, it will be recalled, consists of strongly causal proposi

the Azande. In spite of what Taussig implies, Zande medical divination

Ratshidi of Southern Africa. Am. Eth The Hague: Mouton