The social politics of health and healing: archaeological approaches to social meanings and practices of illness and well-being.

Summary

Colonial regimes of knowledge and practice and the attendant maintenance of biological, raced, class-based, and gendered difference have remained central concerns for social historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Within this milieu of colonial studies, social histories of Western medicine have increasingly interrogated the connections between biological science and racial and gendered difference. Social constructionist approaches to biomedicine provide a useful groundwork for archaeologists to move beyond strictly Foucauldian conceptions of subjectivity to understand contrasting social meanings and practices of illness and healing. In turn, targeted studies of material culture elucidate how conditions of oppression and trauma, and subsequent patterns of resistance and healing, are shaped by various circumstances. My own research at a plantation hospital on St. Croix, USVI aims to understand the social politics of health within this framework. The colonial past for many communities is not a historical legacy; rather the effects of colonialism and enslavement are evidenced today by the physiological and psychological outcomes of exclusionary and racist health policies. Archaeological studies of healing and medical practice can work to break down conceptual and methodological boundaries that perpetuate fundamental differences between “traditional” healing practices and scientific medicine, while stressing the importance of non-oppressive medical models.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Why Social Archaeology Matters

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