Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach - Second Edition

An ideal core text for introductory courses, Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach, Second Edition, offers an accessible and contemporary overview of this rapidly expanding field. For each health issue examined in the text, the authors first present basic biological information on specific conditions and then expand their analysis to include evolutionary, historical, and cross-cultural perspectives on how these issues are understood. Medical Anthropology considers how a biocultural approach can be applied to more effective prevention and treatment efforts and underscores medical anthropology's potential to improve health around the world.

Dr. Andrea Wiley received her B.A. in Biological Basis of Behavior from University of Pennsylvania; M.A.'s in Demography and Anthropology from University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD in medical anthropology from University of California-Berkeley & UC San Francisco in 1992. Her interests are in the areas of maternal and child health, nutrition, demography, adaptation, and human life history. She has conducted long-term fieldwork in India, both in the Himalaya (the topic of her first book, An Ecology of High Altitude Infancy; Cambridge University Press, 2004) and now in Pune, where she is conducting research on the relationship between milk consumption and child growth. She is also author of Re-Imagining Milk (Routledge, 2011) and working on a new comparative book on milk in India and the U.S. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Human Biology Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN.

Dr. John S. Allen received his BA in Anthropology and Molecular Biology, and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from U.C. Berkeley. After completing a postdoc working on the neurogenetics of Alzheimer disease at Stanford University, he joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He subsequently worked as a neuroscience researcher at the University of Iowa, where he also taught medical anthropology. He is currently a research scientist in the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California. His primary research interests are the evolution of the human brain and behavior and behavioral disease. He has conducted fieldwork in Japan, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Palau. He has received awards for his teaching both as a graduate student instructor at U.C. Berkeley and as a faculty member at the University of Auckland. He is the co-author (with Craig Stanford and Susan Ant�n) of the popular text, Biological Anthropology: The Natural History of Humankind (3rd edition, Pearson, 2012). He is also the author of The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2009) and the forthcoming The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food (Harvard University Press, 2012).