Transcript Ethnographies of Infectious Diseases

Ethnographies of
Infectious Diseases
EH lecture on 8.11.2002
Notes on malaria
• Mostly, non-medical anthropologists research this field
• biomedical disease concpets do not stand 1:1 with
indigenous classifications
• All scholarly traditions recognise malaria, easy to correlate
with biomedicine becuase of the easy recognisable fever
Malaria in Tansania
• Many kinds of M: sore, lethargic feeling, no fever can be
malaria
• cerebral malaria is often not recognised as malaria because
of convulsions.
• Anaemia is related to malaria but often not recognised
• “tropical disease” label is a sign of naturalisation of social
causes, disease of poverty