William W. Dressler | |
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Born | 1951 (age 71–72) |
Nationality | American |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | "Hypertension in St. Lucia: social and cultural dimensions" (1978) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Anthropology |
Sub-discipline | Psychological anthropology,Medical anthropology, |
Institutions | University of Alabama |
William W. "Bill" Dressler (born 1951) is an American anthropologist known for his concept of cultural consonance and work on cultural models especially in the context of biocultural medical anthropology. He has done fieldwork in Mexico,Brazil,the West Indies,and the United States,and worked at the University of Alabama since 1978. He is now Professor Emeritus. [1] In 2023,he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. [2]
Dressler grew up in Iowa and studied anthropology with Doug Caulkins at Grinnell College, [3] graduating in 1973. He received his PhD from the University of Connecticut in 1978,having studied there under Pertti J. ("Bert") Pelto. [1] [4]
Dressler conducted his dissertation fieldwork on the West Indian island of St. Lucia. This was an early contribution to a biocultural orientation in medical anthropology in that he examined how individual-level changes in social status related to economic development were associated with blood pressure. He won the Stirling Award in Culture and Personality Studies from the American Anthropological Association in 1979 for a paper based on this research. [5]
When he arrived in Alabama in 1978,he began a long-term collaboration with the local African American community in research on health problems impacting that community,including high blood pressure and mild psychiatric disorder. Dressler's 1991 book Stress and Adaptation in the Context of Culture:Depression in a Southern Black Community summarized much of that work. It examined the complex ways that cultural,historical,psychological,and physiological factors can interact to shape health outcomes. [6]
In the early 1980s Dressler also established a long-term relationship with researchers in Brazil,including JoséErnesto dos Santos,Mauro C. Balieiro,and Rosane Pilot Pessa. Together,these investigators carried out five major projects over a thirty-year period,as well as a number of smaller studies,focused on the interaction of cultural,social,psychological,nutritional,and genetic influences on health. It was in the context of this research that Dressler developed the theory and method of cultural consonance as a means of locating individuals in the cultural space defined by shared cultural models. [7] [8]
Dressler describes cultural consonance as "the degree to which individuals,in their own beliefs and behaviors,approximate the prototypes for belief and behavior encoded in cultural models. Higher cultural consonance is associated with better health status (assessed psychologically,physiologically,immunologically,and morphologically). Cultural consonance expands on cultural consensus theory,a method from cognitive anthropology developed by Romney and others, [9] in order to measure the content and impact of various culturally held beliefs or culturally shared experience. The concept of cultural consonance and the associated measurement model have also shed new light on some basic theoretical questions in anthropology regarding culture." [1]
Dressler also contributed to the development of "residual agreement analysis,' a way of quantifying aspects of variation and non-agreement in culturally shared ideas. [10]
He was president of the Society for Medical Anthropology (1999-2001) and member of the editorial boards of multiple anthropological journals. As of 2019,he has more than 120 publications indexed in Web of Science,which have been cited more than 2,600 times. [11] Dressler's book Culture and the Individual:Theory and Method of Cultural Consonance won the annual book prize from the Society for Anthropological Sciences in 2019. [12] His work was the subject of a retrospective panel at the 2019 joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society/La SociétéCanadienne d'Anthropologie. [13]
Also in 2019 he was selected to present in the "Last Lecture" series at the University of Alabama, [14] and in 2021 he received the Conrad M. Arensberg Award from the American Anthropological Association for fresh and innovative contributions to anthropology as a natural science. [15]
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity,concerned with human behavior,human biology,cultures,societies,and linguistics,in both the present and past,including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior,while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning,including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Social science is one of the branches of science,devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology,the original "science of society",established in the 19th century. In addition to sociology,it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines,including anthropology,archaeology,economics,human geography,linguistics,management science,communication science and political science.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease,health care systems,and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology,and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health,health care and related issues.
Edward Twitchell Hall,Jr. was an American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher. He is remembered for developing the concept of proxemics and exploring cultural and social cohesion,and describing how people behave and react in different types of culturally defined personal space. Hall was an influential colleague of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.
In the social sciences and related fields,a thick description is a description of human social action that describes not just physical behaviors,but their context as interpreted by the actors as well,so that it can be better understood by an outsider. A thick description typically adds a record of subjective explanations and meanings provided by the people engaged in the behaviors,making the collected data of greater value for studies by other social scientists.
In epistemology,and more specifically,the sociology of knowledge,reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect,especially as embedded in human belief structures. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a relationship in which neither can be assigned as causes or effects.
Anthropology of media is an area of study within social or cultural anthropology that emphasizes ethnographic studies as a means of understanding producers,audiences,and other cultural and social aspects of mass media.
Robert I. Levy was an American psychiatrist and anthropologist known for his fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal and on the cross-cultural study of emotions. Though he did not receive a formal degree in anthropology,he spent most of his adult life conducting anthropological fieldwork or teaching in departments of anthropology. In developing his approach to anthropology,he credited his cousin,the anthropologist Roy Rappaport,and Gregory Bateson.
Biocultural anthropology can be defined in numerous ways. It is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture. "Instead of looking for the underlying biological roots of human behavior,biocultural anthropology attempts to understand how culture affects our biological capacities and limitations."
Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge,cultural innovation,and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians,ethnographers,archaeologists,linguists,musicologists,and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge,in the sense of what they think subconsciously,changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to anthropology:
Nutritional anthropology is the study of the interplay between human biology,economic systems,nutritional status and food security. If economic and environmental changes in a community affect access to food,food security,and dietary health,then this interplay between culture and biology is in turn connected to broader historical and economic trends associated with globalization. Nutritional status affects overall health status,work performance potential,and the overall potential for economic development for any given group of people.
Alan H. Goodman is a biological anthropologist and author. He served as president of the American Anthropological Association from 2005 to 2007. With Yolanda Moses,he co-directs the American Anthropological Association's Public Education Project on Race. His teaching,research and writing focuses on understanding how poverty,inequality and racism “get under the skin.”He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Goodman was a pre-doctoral research fellow in stress physiology at the Karolinska Institute,Stockholm and a postdoctoral fellow in international nutrition at the University of Connecticut and the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition,Mexico.
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe,where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States,social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
Robert Bush Lemelson is an American cultural anthropologist,film producer,and philanthropist. Lemelson received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California,Los Angeles. Lemelson's area of specialty is transcultural psychiatry;Southeast Asian Studies,particularly Indonesia;and psychological and medical anthropology. He currently is a research anthropologist in the Semel Institute of Neuroscience UCLA,and an adjunct professor of Anthropology at UCLA. His scholarly work has appeared in numerous journals and books. Lemelson founded Elemental Productions in 2008,a documentary production company,and has directed and produced numerous ethnographic films. His blog Psychocultural Cinema contains numerous blog-posts and edited film works.
Political economy in anthropology is the application of the theories and methods of historical materialism to the traditional concerns of anthropology,including but not limited to non-capitalist societies. Political economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Most anthropologists moved away from modes of production analysis typical of structural Marxism,and focused instead on the complex historical relations of class,culture and hegemony in regions undergoing complex colonial and capitalist transitions in the emerging world system.
The anthropology of institutions is a sub-field in social anthropology dedicated to the study of institutions in different cultural contexts.
Naomi Robin Quinn was a major figure in cognitive anthropology,with contributions to research methods and cultural models,particularly applied to topics such as American models of marriage and relationships and to child-rearing cross-culturally.
Anthropology is the study of human societal and cultural development in the past,present,and future with a number of facets that are categorized into five different fields. These fields include:Biological (Physical) Anthropology,Cultural (socio-cultural) Anthropology,Linguistic Anthropology (Linguistics),Archaeology,and Applied anthropology. Applied anthropology is the analysis of human interaction with the purpose of solving practical problems that affect and arise throughout time between cultures and societies. Applied Anthropologists use many different methods to conduct research on agriculture,health and medicine,housing,social services,political-economic development,displacement and resettlement,business and industry,education,nutrition,environment,and aging. Applied Anthropology research methods are:1.) policy research,2.) evaluation research,3.) cultural intervention,4.) activist (action) research,5.) participatory action research (PAR).