The subfield of biological anthropology that I have the most interest in is Medical Anthropology, because it focuses on current problems around the world in healthcare. The international journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly (MAQ) is a good resource for learning about contemporary research in various formats. The goal of the journal “is to stimulate development of important theory, methods, and debates in medical anthropology and to explore the links between medical anthropology, the broader field of anthropology, and neighboring fields in the humanities, social sciences, and health-related disciplines, including public health and clinical practice.” The MAQ has Medical Anthropology information formatted as research articles, review articles, and book reviews. By browsing through the numerous titles and abstracts available in the journal, it’s quite apparent that Medical Anthropology relies heavily on interdisciplinarity to contribute to the field of anthropology. 

One article that I briefly read through from the current issue was titled: “Protestant Techniques of Care: The Hindu, the Pentecost, and the ‘Secular.’” This study is an example of how Medical Anthropology analyses multiple components of the culture that they’re studying, such as the core values of the religions, and how that relates to the community’s health. Furthermore, this study in particular does a cross-analysis, comparing the multiple religious perspectives in the Trinidad, as well as other Caribbean islands. 

Another study from the current issue that I examined, titled “Re‐racialization of Addiction and the Redistribution of Blame in the White Opioid Epidemic,” sums up the main focus in one line that I found to be quite powerful: “The rise of opioid abuse among Whites has resulted in popular narratives of victimization by prescribers, framing of addiction as a biological disease, and the promise of pharmaceutical treatments that differ from the criminalizing narratives that have historically described urban Latino and black narcotic use.” This article shows me another side of Medical Anthropology, and how it can assess racism in our very own culture by studying health issues. What makes Medical Anthropology interesting to me, is how the expertise of individuals from several disciplines comes into play (such as social scientists, human biologists, and health care providers) to address a social issue in today’s world. 

I found that there was a wide variety of research topics and themes as I browsed through the current issue of MAQ. The final article that I would like to touch on caught my attention due to its focus on the elderly in the United States, titled: “On Being (Not) Old: Agency, Self‐care, and Life‐course Aspirations in the United States.” This article truly encompasses the multidisciplinarity of Medical Anthropology, as it touches on many different topics relating to health care in our own eldery culture, such as race, identity, self care, ageism, stigmatism, and the socioeconomic hierarchy. Furthermore, similar to the previous article mentioned, this one takes a step back and critiques our own culture, which is an important theme in anthropology, so that we might observe other cultures, and ask where we might be lacking in comparison.

Source: http://medanthroquarterly.org/