Research

Medical anthropology is a dynamically developing part of social and cultural anthropology/ethnology with a focus on human health, health systems, and biocultural adaptation. Health, diseases, and treatment are considered social phenomena. The factors and the ways in which healthcare and medicine are organized in different societies are studied – the development of health and medical ideas, practices, and experience in their social and cultural diversity.

The Department “Medical Anthropology” focuses on a wide range of topics that are studied historically at the macro (global/European), meso- (regional/national) and micro-level (social, ethnic, religious, professional groups), taking into account the importance of social categories (gender, age, education, status, etc.):

– Impact of social, environmental, and biological factors on health and.

– Folk medicine, traditional knowledge, and experience for health preservation and recovery, healers, healing methods and practices, and healing rituals.

– Cultural and historical conditions shaping medical practices and policies.

– Development of biomedicine and medical research; interaction with folk medicine.

– Development of views on norms and pathology, health, and diseases.

– Development of medical and cultural moral and ethical norms, bioethics.

– State policies, concepts, institutions in medicine and healthcare – from birth to old age, the medicalization of death.

– Social and political contexts of clinical experiments, vaccine trials, and dosage forms.

– Cultural conditioning and social organization of the doctor/medical staff – patients’ relationships.

– Vulnerable groups, socially significant diseases, and their conceptualizations.

– Distribution of diseases and inequalities in health.