Anthropology group assignment for section C students

January 2021.

Chapter 1 - Contribution of Anthropology in terms of

peace and security, healthcare and development
1.1 Contribution of Anthropology in terms of peace and security
1.1.1 What is peace?
peace is a stress-free state of security and calmness that comes when there’s no
fighting or war, everything coexisting in perfect harmony and freedom

1.1.1.1Contribution of anthropology in terms of peace

Regarding the study of peace, anthropology has not really achieved its full
potential. An anthropology of peace can serve the recovery of marginalized voices
of traditional societies that have been objectified by Western knowledge and
misused to serve intractable biases about an inherently aggressive human nature.

Anthropology demonstrates that each and every society has conflict management
and resolution mechanisms, critically challenging notions of cultural superiority,
and renewing rather than undermining normative consensus with regard to
human well-being.

anthropology suggests that some value orientations are more supportive of non-
violent conflict resolution than are others. Making an ethical and normative shift
along an aggressiveness-to-peacefulness continuum towards the peaceful pole
may be fraught with difficulties, but it is possible, as demonstrated in both
traditional and modern societies, as well as in post-conflict societies. Moreover,
peaceful societies and peace systems which reflect values favoring peace over
violence can be created.

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Anthropology helps us fight against prejudices and discriminations. It helps us

fight against ethnocentrism. The attitude that one’s own culture and one’s ways
of life is the center of the world the best of all. This arises from ignorance about
other ethical groups and their ways of life.

1.1.2 What is security?

Security means safety, as well as the measures taken to be safe or protected. In
order to provide adequate security for the parade, town officials often hire extra
guards.
1.1.2.1contribuition of anthropology in terms of security
Anthropology’s’ contribution is important since it provides a vision of a human
being that constitutes a solid basis for constructing a comprehensive security
model. A robust productive model consists of four key variables.

A. Individual dimension

Human security is designed to prevent both violent and nonviolent threats, which
they may suffer. From this perspective the basic and fundamental objective of
security is to ensure a life worthy of people. Thus, it can be described as a
protection of individuals from risks to their physical or psychological safety as well
as the dignity and quality of life which all person have the right lead. In fact, any
person by the mere fact of being a person is an absolute value in itself. From this
follows that individuals are those who should primarily be protected. If we ask
ourselves what kinds of properties are those that make us men enable us to
match with one another, the answer is clear: we are all individuals and should be
treated as such.

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B. Social dimension: public security

Tensions, struggles and use of force constitute an element being constantly

present throughout the history of mankind, both between individuals and
between nations. And similarly, present is the effort of the members of any social
group to avoid what Hobbes termed as the war of all against all. Since the
emergence of the modern state one appeals to its power to guarantee security of
its citizens. It is taken for granted, however, that it is the only entity with the
power to legally employ the monopoly on violence. Analysis of failed states
demonstrates the correctness of this decision. Nowadays, it is considered that
security must be present in the basic structure of any society.

C. Symbolic dimension: cultural security

It is true that we are entering a hyper-connected, multipolar and post Western

world. But it is equally true that is organized and governed by the standards that
created the knowledge arisen in this area of civilization. Through the so-called
mass culture, it has imposed upon the rest of the societies its ways of thinking
and living: Western man determines the Man. The rejection of this foisting allows
us to understand that we are in a situation of cultural war.

1.2 Contribution of Anthropology in terms of healthcare

1.2.1 What is healthcare?

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Healthcare refers to the organized provision of medical care to people and

communities. By that definition, healthcare careers do not just include doctors,
nurses, and other frontline clinicians who often come to mind first when people think
of healthcare jobs. Administrators, therapists, chiropractors, paramedics, and
technology professionals all have a place in helping people live well.

Due to its size and diversity, healthcare welcomes new professionals with many
different skills, interests, and personalities. In general, people who work in this sector
have hearts to serve others and intellectual interests in math and sciencesss

Many people in the fields of medicine and public health do not understand the
potential role that anthropology could play in the development of public health
policy.

Anthropologists have been interested in medical practices for many decades

WHAT DOES ANTHROPOLOGY BRING TO PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY

DEVELOPMENT?

A) Integrated Perspective of Culture

When striving to understand disease etiology among a given population, public

health specialists and human ecologists often use a 'multifactorial model of
disease' (Curnow and Smith). This is a model in which there are a number of
distinct factors that are thought to contribute to disease in the population.
Culture is one of these factors, alongside many others, including: genetics,
environment and so forth. The factorial model seems consistent with earlier

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medical anthropological research, relating to the method of the clinically applied

anthropologist. By involving anthropologists on a clinical level, it is possible to
reduce the impact of the culture 'factor' on disease prevalence.

Many medical anthropologists see this model of disease as outdated and

inaccurate because "it reduces the investigation of social and cultural aspects of
disease to discrete, static, quantifiable 'beliefs' held by the study population”. This
factorial notion of disease seems to involve the reasoning that factors of disease
causation such as biology and environment are beyond the reach of culture. A
modern conception of culture, as accepted by most anthropologists is significantly
more complex and all-encompassing. In contemporary medical anthropology, it is
believed that all research, even the most subjective and scientific, is rooted in the
culture and experience of those who interpret and publish the results.

B) Holism

The new medical anthropology's "inclusion of 'the whole'" (Porter 139) is another
important tool that has the potential to be of great use in policy development.
Anthropology is involved in seeing the entire situation in a given community. This
involves participant observation in order to capture the smallest details in the
events of individuals' lives. This also involves study of the macro-level forces and
structures that are acting on people that cause them to behave the way they do.

The importance of anthropology's holism also relates to dispelling the notion of

the factorial model. The factorial model sees culture in isolation from all other
factors. This type of reasoning can lead to what Helman calls 'victim blaming'. The
same pattern can be observed in public health policy if culture is considered

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isolated from political, social and economic factors. Heald provides an example
from her research on HIV/AIDS policy in Botswana.

C) Critical Perspective

The third feature unique to the new medical anthropology making it a valuable
contributor to public health practice is its freedom from the theories and views of
western biomedicine. Biomedicine, epidemiology and the other contributing
sciences are inherently reductionist and hence have a very narrow scope in which
to view the phenomenon of illness or epidemic. Everything is expected to have an
explanation grounded in biology or 'science'.

One of the distinguishing features of the new medical anthropology is its

tendency to be critical ― especially of the hegemonic structure of biomedicine.
Scheper-Hughes states that: "our work should be at the margins, questioning
premises, and subjecting epistemologies that represent powerful, political
interests to oppositional thinking" ("Three Propositions" 196). This type of
oppositional thinking is important in generating new theories and in promoting
necessary discourse to effectuate much needed change in public health systems.

To this day, one often hears allegations against anthropology for its past as the
'handmaiden' of colonialism. As a result of having to defend itself from these
claims, the discipline has become very critical of hegemonic power structures that
are involved in neo-colonial oppression of the afflicted and underprivileged.
Biomedicine is a classic example of such a potentially oppressive structure.

D Qualitative Analysis

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The fourth significant contribution that anthropology makes to the development

of public health policy is its qualitative approach to data collection. This is also
unique to anthropology among all of the sciences that inform public health policy.
The qualitative methodology of ethnography separates anthropology from all of
the natural sciences and many of the social sciences. Ian Hacking explains why
qualitative data is so important in his critique of statistical data: "The fetishistic
collection of overt statistical data about a population has as its motto 'information
and control' but it would more truly be 'disinformation and mismanagement'". His
premise is that quantitative analysis requires extensive categorization. Many of
the categories that are used are in essence constructs of the investigators and do
not even exist in the worldview of the informant. This creates a false perception
of reality in the minds of policymakers that cannot be avoided through structured,
quantitative analysis.

1.3 Contribution of Anthropology in terms of development

1.3.1 what is development?

Development is a process that creates growth, progress, positive change or the

addition of physical, economic, environmental, social and demographic

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components. ... The identification of these traps enables relating to political –

economic – social conditions in a country in an attempt to advance development.

Some anthropologists select the ideas, processes and institutions of

development as their field of study, but such work has tended to be highly
suspicious, if not frankly critical, in its approach. At one level,
anthropological work on development has flowed seamlessly from many
anthropologists’ long-standing concerns with the social and cultural effects of
economic change in the less developed areas of the world. Such work has
shown how the incorporation of local communities into wider capitalist
relations of production and exchange has profound implications for both. For
example, Wilson’s (1942) work in Zambia in the late 1930s showed the ways
in which industrialization and urbanization processes were structured by
colonial policies that discouraged permanent settlement and led to social
instability, as massive levels of male migration took place back and forth
between rural and urban areas. Long’s (1977) ‘actor-oriented’ work in Peru
explored local, small-scale processes of growth, entrepreneurialism and
diversification in an area for which the dependency theorists might have
argued that there would only be stagnation, challenging macro-level structural
analyses by focusing on the complexity and dynamism of people’s own
strategies and struggles. Updating such approaches to understanding social
and economic change, Arce and Long (2000) make the case for the role of the
anthropologist as furthering understanding of the ‘localized maternities’
through ethnographic study of the ways in which dominant development
processes are fragmented, reinterpreted and embedded.

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A more explicit area of anthropological analysis in relation to development

has been research on the performance of development projects, by studying
the ways in which such projects operate within and act upon local populations.
Here the dominant emphasis has been to understand the reasons why they
‘fail’, with few studies bothering to examine why some projects ‘succeed’.
A classic study of this kind was Barnett’s (1977) analysis of the Gezira land-
leasing scheme in Sudan introduced by the British in the 1920s, which aimed
to control local labor and secure cotton exports. The study found that the
paternalistic structure of the intervention led to stagnation and dependency,
since there were no incentives for farmers to innovate. Another key theme
within anthropological work has been the gendered character of outsiders’
understandings of productive relations and intra-household processes. For
example, Rogers (1980) set out the patriarchal assumptions brought by
development planners to the design and implementation of 2 Recent work by
Mosse (2003) challenges this instrumentalist view of projects and
development policy by analyzing the ways in which a wide range of interests
and coalitions in practice negotiate the labelling of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ along
political lines. development interventions, such as the skewed emphasis on
the nuclear family structures in contexts where extended families are the
norm, or an engagement only with male farmers or household heads to the
exclusion of women’s roles in production and decision making. Finally, in
another influential study, Mamdani (1972) laid bare the gulf which existed
between the outsiders’ assumptions and local peoples’ priorities, when he
analyzed the failure of a family planning project in India. This failure was
believed by planners to be the result of people’s ignorance of the advantages

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of smaller families and of family planning techniques, but Mamdani showed

that in reality it was the outcome of strong incentives among the poor to
maintain high fertility levels, since large families were given high cultural and
economic value.
The focus within these kinds of anthropological studies has mainly been
on the so-called ‘beneficiaries’ of development assistance.

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