What about Ethnomedizin? Reflections on the early days of medical anthropologies in German-speaking countries

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the historical and theoretical developments of Ethnomedizin in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It demonstrates the richness of this interdisciplinary field at the interface of anthropology, medicine and public health, and provides the unique perspectives of some of its founders from the 1970s onwards.

Keywords:

• medical anthropology
• ethnomedicine
• history
• biomedicine
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the extensive editorial work that has gone into this paper. The Austrian part of the paper was presented at the conference ‘Medical anthropology in Europe’ funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Anthropological Institute.

Conflict of interest: none.

Notes

1. His book Der Gestaltkreis was translated into French by Michel Foucault and Daniel Rocher (Weizsäcker 1958 [1940]). Translations of part of his work exist, e.g. in Japanese, Spanish and Italian, but not in English.

2. This section is based on the writing and information provided by Ekkehard Schröder.

3. The first three newsletters of AfE were reprinted in 2010 issues of Curare 33, no. 1+2: 135–52. On early developments, see also Schröder (2002).

4. In autumn of 1973, Evans-Pritchard had planned to come to Vienna but unfortunately died on 11 September of the same year (letter to Armin Prinz).

5. For more detail, see Münzenmeier (2011).