A Kleinman
Biographic Data
| ID | 1827 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Kleinman |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Kleinman |
| SIGNATURE | KLEINMAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0721-2017 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 145 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1402 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 145 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture
Good Mental Health Care
What makes for good mental health care? What are the barriers to good care and, when they can be overcome, what accounts for successful treatment? What does successful treatment and care, in fact, mean? Can they mean different things to different people? If so, how can we think about them in a practical way that is useful to patients, families, and clinicians? On the one hand, from work infields as various as neuroscience, clinical psychology, an…
Introduction
The underpinnings of today's mental health crisis include both social structural inequities and neurobiological vulnerabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded and escalated a long-standing problem, rendering the mental health crisis and its dangerous consequences visible and exigent. We now possess a clearer and more nuanced understanding of the broken mental health care system and its serious inadequacies, as well as its potential for eff…
Culture, Suicide, and the Human Condition
Suicide is a puzzling phenomenon. Not only is its demarcation problematic but it also eludes simple explanation. The cultures in which suicide mortality is high do not necessarily have much else in common, and neither is a single mental illness such as depression sufficient to lead a person to suicide. In a word, despite its statistical regularity, suicide is unpredictable on the individual level. The main argument emerging from this collection i…
Practical Resilience
Social Technology
Population aging is a defining demographic reality of our era. It is associated with an increase in the societal burden of delivering care to older adults with chronic conditions or frailty. How to integrate global population aging and technology development to help address the growing demands for care facing many aging societies is both a challenge and an opportunity for innovation. We propose a social technology approach that promotes use of te…
When the trial ends
This is an ethnographic study that examines the experiences of peer counsellors in the Thinking Healthy Programme Peer-delivered (THPP), a randomized controlled trial of a psychological intervention for perinatal depression in Goa, India. Based on nine months of fieldwork from 2015 to 2017 and through caregiving theories posited by one of us, we examine how caregiving is experienced by peer counsellors in a randomized controlled trial, a context …
Concluding Remarks
Complementing standard western measures of depression with locally co-developed instruments
Our present understanding of depression relies on a Western nosology that might not be generalizable across diverse cultures around the world. As a consequence, current clinical research and practice may not capture culturally salient features of depression. Expanded cross-cultural research that uses ethnographic methods and local instruments may yield information of clinical utility to enhance culturally sensitive research and practice. In this …
Introduction. Experiments between Anthropology and Philosophy
Covid-19 Requires a Social Medicine Response
Covid-19 is an inherently social disease, with exposure, illness, care, and outcomes stratified along familiar social, economic, and racial lines. However, interventions from public health and clinical medicine have focused primarily on the scale-up of technical and biomedical solutions that fail to address the social contexts driving its distribution and burden. Fused with a moment of reckoning with racial injustice and economic inequality in th…
Trees and Forests
When should systems know us as people and not as just data? Who watches the watcher when abstractions and aggregated data are used to make decisions about our lives? The flow of information and data between human and machine systems are a source of both progress and anxiety. In this session, we consider how a change in perspective (scale) leads to shifts in how data is contextualized and understood. Implications are presented on the ethnographer'…
Challenging Bigger, Faster, Easier, Broader
In this session, we consider how ethnographic perspectives illuminate the importance of goals beside or alongside 'bigger, faster, easier, broader' and how we re-orient stakeholders to new goals while still creating business value. We'll discuss shared challenges and strategies for building corporate models of scale that can speak to and learn from alternative goals and metrics
Built to Scale
Architecture isn't just art; it physically shapes the ways in which we live and work. This session explores the intersections of vision and concrete building materials, thinking through the ways in which people and populations are affected by the built environment. In these ways, spaces are different from places. These works address the importance/centrality of different types of buildings (edifices) and the practices that they make possible
Chapter Eight. Quests for Meaning
Chronic Conditions, Fluid States
Chronic Conditions, Fluid States explores the uneven impact of chronic illness and disability on individuals, families, and communities in diverse local and global settings. To date, much of the social as well as biomedical research has treated the experience of illness and the challenges of disease control and management as segmented and episodic. Breaking new ground in medical anthropology by challenging the chronic/acute divide in illness and …
The China Questions
The Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable development
Rebuilding patient–physician trust in China, developing a trust‐oriented bioethics
The vicious circle of patient–physician mistrust in China
To investigate the phenomenon of patient–physician mistrust in China, a qualitative study involving 107 physicians, nurses and health officials in Guangdong Province, southern China, was conducted through semi‐structured interviews and focus groups. In this paper we report the key findings of the empirical study and argue for the essential role of medical professionalism in rebuilding patient‐physician trust. Health professionals are trapped in a…
The crisis of patient‐physician trust and bioethics
Trust is indispensable not only for interpersonal relationships and social life, but for good quality healthcare. As manifested in the increasing violence and tension in patient‐physician relationships, China has been experiencing a widespread and profound crisis of patient–physician trust. And globally, the crisis of trust is an issue that every society, either developing or developed, has to face in one way or another. Yet, in spite of some pio…
Exposure to Suicide in High Schools
Adolescents' exposure to a peer's suicide has been found to be associated with, as well as to predict, suicidal ideation and behavior. Although postvention efforts tend to be school-based, little is known about the impact of a schoolmate's suicide on the school's student population overall. The present study seeks to determine whether there is excess psychological morbidity among students in a school where a schoolmate has died by suicide, and wh…
Creating a Creators' Market
This case demonstrates how ongoing ethnographic research from within a corporation led to the re-segmentation of a market. The first part of the case focuses on how a team of social science researchers at a major technology company, Intel, drew on past research studies to develop a point-of-view on the increasing importance of content creation across a range of populations that challenged the findings of a quantitative market sizing study. Drawin…
Caring for memories
Bereavement is a somewhat misleading term for the experience of loss of an intimate person in one’s life. It suggests that the loss itself is the whole experience. But grieving is about yearning as
Anthropology and the
Culture and stigma
Concepts and a model for the comparison of medical systems as cultural systems
How Bodies Remember
AUL CONNERTON, writing in a widely cited essay that decisively summarizes the ideas of many social theorists, claims that collective and individual memory are so thoroughly interconnected, and that those interconnections are so central to how societies reproduce their social order across generations, that it is appropriate to analyze how societies remember.2 Basing his analysis on the integration of successive waves of interest in interpretive st…
SubjectivityEthnographic Investigations
This innovative volume is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this preeminent group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communi…
Face' and the embodiment of stigma in China
Biomedical Practice and Anthropological Theory
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
The social course of epilepsy
Social Origins of Distress and Disease; Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China
Compte-rendus de l'ouvrage de meme titre (A. Kleinman, New Haven : Yale University Press, 1986). Comment la conception de la neurasthenie fut importee en Chine durant la periode coloniale et fut reinterpretee par la theorie medicale chinoise et popularisee comme desordre physique plutot que mental
"Everything That Really Matters"
This article explores the concept of "social suffering," referring to the ways in which large-scale social forces-such as poverty, violence, displacement, and torture-cause individual and collective pain and suffering. Kleinman argues that social suffering is not merely the sum of individual suffering, but a distinct phenomenon shaped by social, political, and economic structures. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the subjective exper…
A Methodology for Cross-cultural Ethnomedical Research [and Comments and Reply]
What matters most
Stigma
Anthropology
Local Worlds of Suffering
Ethnography is advanced as a methodology that links the humanities and social sciences with the health sciences. Ethnography deepens the study of human suffering by refraining the experience of illness as interpersonal processes in a moral context. Because ethnography's validity depends on the skills and training of the ethnographer, medical ethnographers must be effectively prepared to conduct research studies. This will become a serious issue i…
Perspectives of the Placebo Phenomenon
Stigmatizing experience and structural discrimination associated with the treatment of schizophrenia in Hong Kong
The experience of Sars-related stigma at Amoy Gardens
Part Four
Recent developments in international health are used as a platform for criticizing the biomedical and social science models dominating contemporary international medicine from the standpoint of ethno‐medicine. This critique is advanced both on the grounds of theory and of practical issues in the organization and delivery of clinical and public health services. Implications for cross‐cultural research and for the planning of international health a…
Interpreting Illness Experience and Clinical Meanings
Closure as Cure
A close semiotic relationship links textual form, social relations, and the etiology of illness. Using an ethnographic study of "evil eye" headaches on Crete and the verbal and other curing methods used there, this paper attempts to show how the villagers deploy textual form to explore and control both bodily and social discomfort and in some cases to "translate" inchoate experience-both bodily and social-into manageable bodily images. Textual cl…
Medical humanitarianism
Lessons From a Clinical Approach to Medical Anthropological Research
Pitch, picture, power
Veena Das's work on suffering suggests that the appropriate approach to the subject is one that grounds research in social experience. To honor this pitch of anthropology, I examine the global mediatization of the trauma of political violence and its moral implications. I also describe the professional appropriation of suffering that transforms political economic conditions into medical realities. Because social experience is itself undergoing a …
Violence and well-being
What Kind of Model for the Anthropology of Medical Systems
Violence and Demoralization in the New World Disorder
Etude des consequences de la violence dans les Etats non seulement du point de vue de l'individu mais aussi du point de vue de l'Etat lui-meme. L'absence de controle de cette violence supprime toute morale. L'opposition Etat-Individu n'est plus de mise
Contextual Knowledge
As our general view of global history and societal development has shifted towards a more integrated approach, we face the challenge of finding the best ways to achieve integration across geographical and cultural distances. In dealing with the rising challenges associated with the global trend of demographic aging, it is argued that obtaining and accumulating contextual knowledge of local practice can be critical and productive especially in the…
Abstracts From Inquiry
Recent writers on economics have conceded that capitalism suffers fronl serious shortcomings. But they argue, that in spite of that, preference should be given to capitalism over alternative systems, because it alone gives free rein to the universal, human desire for private gain and is therefore best adapted to human nature. I argue against this psychological defense of capitalism that the desire for private gain is not a universal trait of hUln…
Serve the people
Culture, and illness
Asian medical systems
Lessons From a Clinical Approach to Medical Anthropological Research
Culture and depression
Concepts and a model for the comparison of medical systems as cultural systems
The Need for Ethnomedical Understanding of Clinical Categories and Praxis
What Kind of Model for the Anthropology of Medical Systems
Part Four
Recent developments in international health are used as a platform for criticizing the biomedical and social science models dominating contemporary international medicine from the standpoint of ethno‐medicine. This critique is advanced both on the grounds of theory and of practical issues in the organization and delivery of clinical and public health services. Implications for cross‐cultural research and for the planning of international health a…
Why do indigenous practitioners successfully heal
Response
Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture
List of Figures Preface 1. Orientations 1: The Problem, the Setting, and the Approach 2. Orientations 2: Culture, Health Care Systems, and Clinical Reality 3. Orientations 3: Core Clinical Functions and Explanatory Models 4. The Cultural Construction of Illness Experience and Behavior, 1: Affects and Symptoms in Chinese Culture 5. The Cultural Construction of Illness Experience and Behavior, 2: A Model of Somatization of Dysphoric Affects and Aff…
Ambulatory medical care in the People's Republic of China
One hundred thirty-eight persons in varying outpatient settings in the People's Republic of China were interviewed briefly. Hospital outpatient utilization appeared to reflect not only severity of illness, but also patients' attitudes and beliefs, illness behavior patterns, and convenience, modifying the formal system of care to some extent. Traditional clinics in commune and county hospitals were typically used to treat psychiatric disorders (de…
Is there a cultural psychiatry? If so, what is it and how does it relate to anthropology
Edward F. Foulks, Ronald M. Wintrob, Joseph Westermeyer, and Armando R. Favazza, eds. Current Perspectives in Cultural Psychiatry. New York: Spectrum Publications (distributed by Halsted Press), 1977. 275 pp. $20.00
Medicine in Chinese Cultures
In order to assess American medical needs, systems in other countries are under review.In the case of China a conference on the comparative study of traditional and modem medicine in Chinese societies was held in 1974 and the forty-nine contributions are published here, grouped into five sections.The first 'Medical systems in Chinese societies', deals with historical perspectives and provides an excellent survey and discussion of traditional Chin…
On illness meanings and clinical interpretation
Recent development of psychiatric epidemiology in China
East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan
An excellent description and analysis of East Asian medicine ...Based on fieldwork conducted in Japan during 1973 and 1974, which involved the use of a variecy of participant-observer techniques, as well as extensive reading in primary and secondary sources in Japanese and English, Lock's study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of an important dimension of life in Japan...In well-written chapters dealing with the philosophical…
Medical Ethics in Imperial China. A Study in Historical Anthropology
The Meaning Context of Illness and Care
This chapter explores the meaning context of illness and care, emphasizing its central role in medical anthropology. Kleinman argues that illness experiences are shaped by cultural interpretations and social interactions, highlighting the importance of understanding the patient's perspective. He introduces the concept of the explanatory model, a framework for analyzing how individuals and groups make sense of sickness, and discusses the interplay…
Depression and somatization
Neurasthenia and depression
Patients treated by physicians and folk healers
Psychology (84 works) · Sociology (69 works) · Medicine (65 works) · Political science (53 works) · Psychiatry (42 works) · Law (29 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Anthropology (23 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Epistemology (23 works)