Byron Good

Last updated
Byron J. Good
Born
Byron Joseph Good

1944
EducationGoshen College (B.A.)
Harvard Divinity School (B.D.)
University of Chicago (Ph.D.)
OccupationMedical anthropologist
EmployerHarvard University

Byron Joseph Good (born 1944) is an American medical anthropologist primarily studying mental illness. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University, where he is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology.

Contents

Good has contributed primarily to the field of psychological anthropology, and his writings have explored the cultural meaning of mental illnesses, patient narratives of illness, the epistemic perspective of biomedicine and its treatment of non-Western medical knowledge, and the comparative development of mental health systems. [1] [2] He has conducted his research in Iran, Indonesia, and the United States.

Education

Good holds a B.A. degree from Goshen College and a B.D. in Comparative Study of Religions from Harvard Divinity School. [3] In 1977, he received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago with a thesis entitled "The Heart of What's the Matter: The Structure of Medical Discourse in a Provincial Iranian Town." [4]

Career

In 2013-2015 Good served as President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. [5] Good delivered the 2010 Marett Memorial Lecture at Oxford University. [6]

Research

Good's recent research and studies the development of mental health services in various cultures, and primarily Indonesia, where he has been conducting research and teaching at the Faculty of Medicine, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta over the past two decades. [7] He is principal investigator and co-director of the International Pilot Study of the Onset of Schizophrenia, which is a multi-site research project examining the social and cultural aspects of early phases of psychotic illness in various cultural contexts. [8] Good and his wife, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, have also been working with the International Organization for Migration on developing mental health services in Aceh, a region where armed conflict and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami have had long-term psychological effects on survivors. [9]

Good's contributions to anthropological theory concern the concept of subjectivity in contemporary societies — specifically addressing the convergence of political, cultural, and psychological dimensions in subjective experience—and with a special focus on Indonesian cultural, political and historical context. [10] He has specifically investigated the ways in which culture and social processes shape the onset, the experience, and the course of psychotic illness, and the ways in which this relationship is embedded in and shaped by local, historical, and political contexts.

Selected publications

Books

  • 1994. Good, Byron J. Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Translated and published in French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese.)

Edited volumes

  • 1985. Kleinman, Arthur and Byron Good, editors. Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross‑Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care Series. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
  • 1992. Good, Mary-Jo D., Paul Brodwin, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley: U. of California Press.
  • 1995. Desjarlais, Robert, Leon Eisenberg, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman. World Mental Health: Problems and Priorities in Low Income Countries. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • 2004. Shweder, Richard and Byron J. Good, eds. Clifford Geertz by his Colleagues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Translated into Indonesian.)
  • 2005. Giarelli, Guido, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Byron Good, eds. Clinical Hermeneutics. Bologna, Italy (in Italian only).
  • 2007. Biehl, Joao, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. University of California Press.
  • 2008. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio, Sandra Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron Good, eds. Postcolonial Disorders. University of California Press.
  • 2009. Hinton, Devon and Byron Good, eds. Culture and Panic Disorder. Palo Alto: CA Stanford University Press.
  • 2010. Good, Byron J., Michael Fischer, Sarah Willen, Mary-Jo Good. A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities. Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.
  • 2015. Devon Hinton and Byron Good, eds. Culture and PTSD. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Related Research Articles

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Arthur Michael Kleinman is an American psychiatrist, social anthropologist and a professor of medical anthropology, psychiatry and global health and social medicine at Harvard University.

In medicine and medical anthropology, a culture-bound syndrome, culture-specific syndrome, or folk illness is a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms that are considered to be a recognizable disease only within a specific society or culture. There are no objective biochemical or structural alterations of body organs or functions, and the disease is not recognized in other cultures. The term culture-bound syndrome was included in the fourth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which also includes a list of the most common culture-bound conditions. Its counterpart in the framework of ICD-10 is the culture-specific disorders defined in Annex 2 of the Diagnostic criteria for research.

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Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.

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Clinical ethnography is a term first used by Gilbert Herdt and Robert Stoller in a series of papers in the 1980s. As Herdt defines it, clinical ethnography

is the intensive study of subjectivity in cultural context...clinical ethnography is focused on the microscopic understanding of sexual subjectivity and individual differences within cross-cultural communities. What distinguishes clinical ethnography from anthropological ethnography in general is (a) the application of disciplined clinical training to ethnographic problems and (b) developmental concern with desires and meanings as they are distributed culturally within groups and across the course of life.

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References

  1. Gaines, Atwood D.; Davis-Floyd, Robbie (2003), "Biomedicine", in Ember, Carol R.; Ember, Melvin (eds.), Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World's Cultures Topics, vol. 1, Springer Science & Business Media, pp. 95–109, ISBN   978-0-306-47754-6
  2. Loewe, Ron (2003), "Illness Narratives", in Ember, Carol R.; Ember, Melvin (eds.), Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World's Cultures Topics, vol. 1, Springer Science & Business Media, p. 44, ISBN   978-0-306-47754-6
  3. "Byron J. Good". Scholars at Harvard. Harvard University. Retrieved 25 May 2016.
  4. "PhD Recipients". Department of Anthropology. The University of Chicago. 2015. Archived from the original on 7 April 2015. Retrieved 25 May 2016.
  5. Presidents Archived 2016-08-05 at the Wayback Machine , Society for Psychological Anthropology. Accessed May 25, 2016
  6. Marett Lectures Archived 2016-04-11 at the Wayback Machine , Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Accessed May 25, 2016
  7. Good, Byron J.; Marchira, Carla; ul Hasanat, Nida; Utami, Mohama Sofiati; Subandi, And (2010), "Is 'Chronicity' Inevitable for Psychotic Illness?", in Manderson, Lenore; Smith-Morris, Carolyn (eds.), Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Chronicity and the Anthropology of Illness, Rutgers University Press, pp. 54–76, ISBN   9780813549736
  8. "Byron J. Good". SHARP: Shanghai Archives of Psychiatry. Archived from the original on 11 June 2016. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  9. Marc, Alexandre; Willman, Alys; Aslam, Ghazia; Rebosio, Michelle; Balasuriya, Kanishka (2012). Societal Dynamics and Fragility: Engaging Societies in Responding to Fragile Situations. World Bank Publications. pp. 184–5. ISBN   978-0-8213-9708-4 . Retrieved 26 May 2016.
  10. Pagis, Michael (January 2008). "Book Review: Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations". American Journal of Sociology. 113 (4). doi:10.1086/533571.