Introducing Health Anthropology - 4th Edition by Merrill Singer & Hans A Baer & Debbi Long (Hardcover)

About the Book

A biosocial approach to understanding health in all of its dimensions across societies and through time

Book Synopsis

A biosocial approach to understanding health in all of its dimensions across societies and through time

Review Quotes

"A classic orientation to an applied field, this book puts the historical praxis of understanding society and health at the center."

"A foundational text for understanding how cultural dimensions of human suffering and healing relate to local and global social inequalities. The case studies foster critical reflection of plural medical systems, offering insight into how access to vital resources shape human responses to the world's most pressing health conditions."

"Merrill Singer and colleagues' timely text is a thoughtful, detailed consideration of historical and current theoretical and methodological practices in health anthropology. The authors draw on their decades of experience to critically inspect the complexities of different medical systems, particularly from a health inequity, biopolitical, and political ecology lens."

"Singer, Baer, Long, and Pavlotski converse with enduring and current concerns, themes, and even labels in the context of novel disciplinary paradigms in this richly detailed and nuanced updated edition, presented with case studies accessible to contemporary scholars and students."

About the Author

Merrill Singer is professor emeritus in the Departments of Anthropology and Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Singer has published 290 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters, and has authored, co-authored or edited thirty-three books. His research and writing have addressed syndemics, HIV/AIDS and STDs in highly vulnerable and disadvantaged populations, illicit drug use and drinking behavior, infectious disease, community and structural violence, and the political ecology of health, including the health consequences of climate change. Dr. Singer has been awarded the Rudolph Virchow Professional Prize, the George Foster Memorial Award for Practicing Anthropology, both the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group's Distinguished Service Award and its Clark Taylor Professional Paper Prize, the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, and the Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

Hans A. Baer is principal honorary research fellow in the School of Social Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Hans was a Fulbright Scholar in at Humboldt University in East Berlin in the German Democratic Republic in 1988-1989. He has taught at several US universities, including George Peabody College for Teachers, St. John's University, the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the University of California - Berkeley, Arizona State University, and at two Australian universities, namely the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. Hans has published twenty-seven books and some 240 book chapters and articles on a diversity of research topics, including Mormonism, African American religion, sociopolitical life in East Germany, critical health anthropology, medical pluralism in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, the critical anthropology of climate change, Australian climate politics, and the political economy of higher education. His most recent books are Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia (2018), Climate Change and Capitalism in Australia: An Eco-Socialist Vision for the Future (2022), The Corporatization and Environmental Sustainability of Australian Universities: A Critical Perspective, and Building the Critical Anthropology of Climate Change: Towards a Socio-Ecological Revolution (with Merrill Singer).

Debbi Long is an honorary senior lecturer in the Wollotuka Institute (Indigenous Studies) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is a critical health anthropologist and a pioneer of hospital ethnography in Australia. She has undertaken health ethnography in Turkey, Eswatini, and in a variety of public hospital contexts in Australia, including maternity, spinal, intensive care and dialysis units. She has worked as a consultant in clinical organization and management on projects including quality improvement, patient safety, behaviour change, and in industrial relations contexts. Other research includes family violence education and workplace injury compensation analysis. She has taught at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in anthropology departments, international development programs, medical, nursing and allied health programs and in Indigenous studies. including foundation and support programs. Debbi is a qualified Permaculture designer and educator, and recent projects involve a focus on food security, circular economies and sustainable building, heavily informed by traditional Indigenous knowledges.

Alex Pavlotski works as a health anthropologist at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne. He specializes in using visual methods in research, co-design methodologies, ethnography, and anthropological teaching. Alex has worked in teaching and research with LaTrobe University, the University of Auckland, the University of Melbourne, and Monash University.