Hans A. Baer

Merrill Singer

Ida Susser

Now in its third edition, this textbook serves to frame understandings of health, health-related behavior, and health care in light of social and health inequality as well as structural violence. It also examines how the exercise of power in the health arena and in society overall impacts human health and well-being. Medical Anthropology and the World System: Critical Perspectives, Third Edition includes updated and expanded information on medical anthropology, resulting in an even more comprehensive resource for undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers worldwide. As in the previous versions of this text, the authors provide insights from the perspective of critical medical anthropology, a well-established theoretical viewpoint from which faculty, researchers, and students study medical anthropology. It addresses the nature and scope of medical anthropology; the biosocial and political ecological origins of disease, health inequities, and social suffering; and the nature of medical systems in indigenous and pre-capitalist state societies and modern societies. The third edition also includes new material on the relationship between climate change and health. Finally, this textbook explores health praxis and the struggle for a healthy world.

Critical Perspectives

Medical Anthropology and the World System

Now in its second edition, Global Capitalism and Climate Change situates anthropogenic climate change in the context of global capitalism as it stands today and explores the systemic changes necessary to create a more socially just, democratic, and environmentally sustainable world system.

The Need for an Alternative World System

Global Capitalism and Climate Change

Grappling with Societies and Institutions in an Era of Socio-Ecological Crisis is an autobiographical ethnography of the journey through various societies and institutions and how they function in the midst of an era of socio-ecological crises. The volume traces the steps of the author in becoming a radical anthropologist, namely through the experience of immigration and naturalization from Peru to the United States and then to Australia, politicization while working as an engineer in the aircraft industry during the late 1960s, socialization in and subsequent exit from Roman Catholicism, and experiences as an academic working in the corporate university. As well, the author illuminates the practices of research and engagement as a scholar-activist on various topics, such as the Levites of Utah and African American Spiritual churches, socio-political and religious life in East Germany, complementary and alternative medicine, the Australian climate movement, and democratic eco-socialism.

Journey of a Radical Anthropologist

Grappling with Societies and Institutions in an Era of Socio-Ecological Crisis

This book chronicles the transformation of the holistic health movement over the past three decades, as it increasingly influences the delivery of health care in America. In it, he describes the battle for legitimacy by alternative therapeutic practitioners, and the biomedical profession's increasing interest in the possibilities of a complementary and integrative medical system. Baer examines a variety of professionalized and lay heterodox therapeutic systems, including chiropractors, naturopaths and acupuncturists, homeopaths, bodyworkers, and lay midwives. He shows, ironically, how the holistic movement may become more limited as it gains acceptance and becomes integrated into mainstream, professional medicine. This book is a valuable resource for instructors, students, professionals and others interested in public health issues, health policy, medical studies, health economics, medical anthropology and sociology.

Merging Alternative Therapies with Biomedicine

Toward an Integrative Medicine

This revised textbook provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical anthropology. The narrative is guided by unifying themes. First, medical anthropology is actively engaged in helping to address pressing health problems around the globe through research, intervention, and policy-related initiatives. Second, illness and disease cannot be fully understood or effectively addressed by treating them solely as biological in nature; rather, health problems involve complex biosocial processes and resolving them requires attention to range of factors including systems of belief, structures of social relationship, and environmental conditions. Third, through an examination of health inequalities on the one hand and environmental degradation and environment-related illness on the other, the book underlines the need for going beyond cultural or even ecological models of health toward a comprehensive medical anthropology. The authors show that a medical anthropology that integrates biological, cultural, and social factors to truly understand the origin of ill health will contribute to more effective and equitable health care systems.

A Discipline in Action

Introducing Medical Anthropology

Recognizing that climate politics has been an increasingly contentious and heated topic in Australia over the past two decades, this book examines Australian capitalism as a driver of climate change and the nexus between the corporations and Coalition and Australian Labor parties. As a highly developed country, Australia is punching above its weight in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas emissions despite rising temperatures, droughts, water shortages and raging bushfires, storm surges and flooding, and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Drawing upon both archival and ethnographic research, Hans Baer examines Australian climate politics at the margins, namely the Greens, the labour union, the environmental NGOs, and the grass-roots climate movement. Adopting a climate justice perspective which calls for "system change, not climate change" as opposed to the conventional approach of seeking to mitigate emissions through market mechanisms and techno-fixes, particularly renewable energy sources, this book posits system-challenging transitional steps to shift Australia toward an eco-socialist vision in keeping with a burgeoning global socio-ecological revolution. Accessibly written and including an interview with renowned comedian and climate activist Rod Quantock OAM, this book is essential reading for academics, students and general readers with an interest in climate change and climate activism.

An Eco-Socialist Vision for the Future

Climate Change and Capitalism in Australia

Baer's exciting new book chronicles the transformation of the holistic health movement as it increasingly influences the delivery of health care in America. He describes the battle for legitimacy by alternative therapeutic practitioners, and the increasing interest by the biomedical profession in the possibilities of a complementary and integrative medical system. Baer shows ironically, how the holistic movement may ultimately become more limited as it gains acceptance and is integrated into mainstream medicine.

Recreating Utopia in the Desert: A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mormonism is the account of a millenarian sect, officially known as the Aaronic Order, one of the main splinter groups of the Mormon Church. Their story tells us much about the social tensions, particularly along class lines, that have emerged in Mormonism. The Aaronic Order, or Levites, emerged as the Mormon Church evolved from a religious utopia in the Midwest, to a near nation-state in the Intermountain West, to finally an international theocratic corporation. Drawing upon the concept of revitalization movements, the Levite sect is viewed as an attempt by working-class Mormons to resurrect the communitarian ideals they perceived as characteristic of earlier nineteenth-century Mormonism. From their beginnings in the Depression, the Levites have developed a series of cooperative and communal ventures in Utah, based upon the revelations of Maurice Glendenning. We see in the Levites the seemingly inevitable processes of institutionalization and fission characterizing revitalization movements that survive. By explaining the impetus for the development of sectarian groups such as the Levites, the author offers important insights for the discussion of religious communitarianism and schizmatic movements in contemporary religion.

A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mormonism

Recreating Utopia in the Desert

This book presents a corrective to conventional portrayals of East German society, both before and after the opening of the Wall in 1989, based largely upon data obtained through participant observation in the German Democratic Republic and the new German states of the Federal Republic of Germany. This account is coupled with an analytical interpretation of the failure to develop socialism in the GDR and the impact of the unification of 1990 on East German social life. The book also examines the legitimization crisis in the GDR, the factors that contributed to the collapse of the GDR state, life inside the Socialist Unity Party from below, the role of the Protestant and Catholic churches in the GDR, and the existential and financial crises within the Protestant churches following unification. The work assesses the contradictions of the 40-year history of the GDR, not only in terms of its shortcomings but also its achievements.

An Ethnography of East Germany Before and After Unification

Crumbling Walls and Tarnished Ideals

This book constitutes an effort to develop a critical social science of climate change, one that posits its roots in global capitalism with its emphasis on profit-making, a treadmill of production and consumption, heavy reliance on fossil fuels, and commitment to ongoing economic expansion.

Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative World System

As global economic and population growth continues to skyrocket, increasingly strained resources have made one thing clear: the desperate need for an alternative to capitalism. In Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia, Hans Baer outlines the urgent need to reevaluate historical definitions of socialism, commit to social equality and justice, and prioritize environmental sustainability. Democatic eco-socialism, as he terms it, is a system capable of mobilizing people around the world, albeit in different ways, to prevent on-going human socio-economic and environmental degradation, and anthropogenic climate change.

Hans A. Baer

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