Question

Dicusssion- The body: Biocultural Perspectives on Health and Illness?

Cultural anthropology

Answer 1

A biocultural approach can be understood as a feedback system through which biological and cultural interact; biology allows certain behaviors to exist in turn those behaviors influence biological traits. Through the understanding of both the biological and cultural implications of disease and embodiment, healing becomes a cultural product, something that makes sense within a particular cultural context. Biocultural research involves integrating how cultures approach health and healing based on gender, class, age, education, and their own traditional experience with illness and healing.

There are three different approaches to biocultural research

1 -  Biological: 'biology matters' this approach focuses on the evolution and how it influences disease

2 - Cultural: 'culture matters' this approach focuses on the interpretation and explanations of illness

3 - Critical: inequality matters' this approach focuses on how inequality shapes disease in society

Cultural anthropology is a major division of anthropology that deals with the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of diverse people of the world.