Ebook: Cultural Illness and Health

This volume, which basically is challenging assumptions underlying concepts of health for individuals and for society, opens with a series of essays on Ethnography in the American Scene. All of these papers deal with topics which on the American scene are viewed as “‘social problems” or crimes: mental retardation; drug addiction, including alcoholism and heroin; and divorce. Despite the fact that research on these very same social problems has been carried on for decades and about which there is a massive literature, each anthropologist has made a singular contribution.