Illness Representations in Medical Anthropology: A Critical Review and a Case Study of the Representation of AIDS in Haiti

Abstract

Anthropologists and psychologists writing about illness representations during the past decade share many concerns: How do individuals conceive illness and symptoms? How do they view their cause, potential consequences, and likely effects on their lives? How do these perceptions influence psychological and behavioral responses? A cursory reading of the literature in health psychology and medical anthropology, however, indicates important differences in the concerns, approaches, and methods of these disciplines. Anthropologists are ethnographers, researchers for whom “the field” is a foreign cultural environment to be experienced, understood, reported on, and analyzed; this is assumed, whether their research site is a remote village in the highlands of New Guinea, a mental health center treating victims of violence in Central America, or an oncology practice in a Boston hospital. Anthropologists from diverse theoretical backgrounds, working in very different settings, thus bring to their research assumptions and problems that mark their writing on illness representations as distinctively anthropological. Two dimensions of this approach are worth noting here.