ABSTRACT
In introducing this volume, we linked the framing and maturing of medical anthropology to social and political movements that gained momentum worldwide in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, medical anthropologists have continued to engage with and be inspired by social movements, as well as by political changes, new developments in biomedicine, and debates in public health. While taking on insistent and emerging questions in policy and practice and pursuing these in different local settings, we have increasingly extended beyond the conventional settings of villages and small towns. We have grown increasingly comfortable working with and within organizations and agencies concerned with health, troubling national and multilateral policies and programs with our own knowledge of local biologies and globalized political economies. And as we have pushed into these wider arenas of health, we have turned, too, to the microspheres of laboratories and hospital spaces, asking both what anthropology adds to an understanding of biology and medicine, and what a different lens-one that includes material as well as human actors-contributes to ideas of the body, health and disease, healing and care. The medical anthropology of the present is very different from the discipline in which we engaged three to four decades ago.
