Medical anthropology in Europe: shaping the field

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Acknowledgements

This special issue is based upon papers presented at the conference ‘Medical Anthropology in Europe’ funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Anthropological Institute.

Conflict of interest: none.

Notes

1. See also Diasio (1999) on central European developments and Ingstad and Talle (2009) on the Nordic network of medical anthropology.

2. Admittedly, the mind (and mental illness) rather than the body figured among the early core themes, but since the body is central to the medical anthropology programme at Oxford, where the RAI conference that prompted this special issue took place, it provided a thematic anchor.

3. European appointments in medical anthropology included those at Perugia (Seppilli, from 1956), Cambridge (Lewis, from 1971), Heidelberg and Zurich (assistant lecturers, from 1977), Amsterdam (Van der Geest, from 1978), and Aix-en-Provence (Benoist, from 1981). These initiatives broadly coincided with North American appointments at McGill (Lock), Harvard (Kleinman, Good) and UC-Berkeley (Leslie, Scheper-Hughes).

4. Beginnings in the 1970s appear to apply only to countries where social anthropology was already an established discipline of higher education. In socialist Croatia, biological anthropologists founded an anthropological society in 1977 and a ‘Commission on Medical Anthropology and Epidemiology’ in 1988, while possibilities for developing a critical medical anthropological perspective arose only after the decline of socialism (Spoliar-Vrzina, in Hsu and Montag 2005: 7). In Spain, Ackerknecht's ‘culturalism’, as adopted by medical historians and folklorists, predominated in discussions when medical anthropology was first instituted in a taught course (in 1981), well before social/cultural anthropology became firmly established (in the early 1990s according to Comelles, Perdiguero, and Martínez-Hernáez (2007 [2005]: 108)). By contrast, in Zurich, when Ethnologie rather than Völkerkunde was being instituted, Ackerknecht was not once mentioned in the first medical anthropology lectures, although he worked until his retirement in 1971 im Turm – ‘in the lofty tower’ of the University's main building, only two flights of stairs above the classroom where the lectures were held (a co-author's observation).