SpringerBriefs in Millennial Medical Anthropology

In the 1970s, Anthropology saw the development of a new field of study that, over the last forty years, became the largest in the discipline. That field is Medical Anthropology. Founding conceptions and perspectives in Medical Anthropology continue in use today and so may be referred to as  ‘Normal’ Medical Anthropology, following Thomas Kuhn’s notion of scientific practices that follow and replicate received knowledge (and practice). One newer perspective, Critical Medical Anthropology, is also Normal or Traditional in that is uses the notion of science as a search for laws in an endeavor that parallels natural sciences, as is the case with much of the rest of Medical Anthropology (MA) that evaluate in terms of and apply biomedical ideology.   

However, MA has grown by leaps and bounds in part because of its ability to redefine and incorporate research previously considered distinct and outside of it main areas of concern (e.g., some aspects of the anthropology of religion and psychological anthropology, bioethics, science studies, gender studies and applied anthropology). As well, the discipline began to shatter conceptions and ‘trouble categories’ of biomedicine and public health, thus calling their received realities into question. The perspectives used were interpretive ones that question the ‘natural’ character of diseases or other afflictions and the enterprises that deal with them and in so go beyond troubling categories to a troubling of disciplinary boundaries leading to new science.  

The editor of this series coined the term Millennial Medical Anthropology (MMA) for that developing branch of Medical Anthropology that, in the mid to late 1990s, showed clear signs of departing from the Normal research paradigms. Researchers were increasingly moving away from causalist, materialist, realism. That departure clearly evidences distinctiveness that was and is deserving of a novel sobriquet, Millennial Medical Anthropology.  

This series, SpringerBriefs in Millennial Medical Anthropology, will showcase the emerging, synthetic perspectives of MMA. It will publish innovative essays, short volumes, edited collections, and essays that fall in spirit of Millennial Medical Anthropology with its foci, some of which are new to MA, i.e., the Cultural Studies of Science and Medicine (history and philosophy of medicine and medical sciences), Cultural Bioethics, Gender and Health, the Anthropology of Biomedicine, Medical Humanities and the Critique of Global (and Public) Health. The series is to be a home for new work in a new century.