Socio-Cultural Construction of Medical Knowledge

Abstract

Western medicine was the standard of evaluation of nonWestern and Western popular medicines that were classified as ‘ethnomedicines.’ Western medicine was assumed to be acultural, scientific, and based upon ‘knowledge’ ‘discovered’ from research on what were thought to be natural afflictions and processes in the human body, as it was perceived in the West. This article charts the development of medical anthropological research in the late 1970s and early 1980s that began the process by which biomedicine's theory, practice, and fooal objects<!––/––>conditions were recognized as cultural historical creations. The sciences drawn upon by biomedicine also have come to be understood as cultural enterprises. The article shows that the current view of what is now labeled biomedicine, to emphasize its biological focus and, hence, its greatest limitation, is as a professional cultural or ethnomedioine.