Sylvie Fainzang

Els van Dongen

Lying rearranges human relationships, contests ideologies and cultural assumptions, and manipulates social reality. In this volume, lying will be shown as one fundamental way of dealing with major issues and challenges with which individuals are confronted, such as health, body and identity concerns. In studying lying in the context of health and illness, the contributors explore the ways people gain power, or negotiate power within the limitations of ethical and moral arrangements they cannot effectively challenge. They consider whether lying is a part of the domain of medicine in particular and the specific benefit people draw or seek from lying in the domain of illness and medicine. Els van Dongen is an anthropologist and lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and a staff member of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR). Sylvie Fainzang is an anthropologist and research fellow at the CERMES in Paris and the CNRS in Aix, France.

Power and Performance

Lying and Illness

Hans Einar Hem

Mette Bech Risor

The Taste for Knowledge: Medical Anthropology Facing Medical Realities demonstrates how medical anthropology is becoming increasingly important in the fields of medical research and public health. The authors examine some of the major issues in medical anthropology today. In this volume, a group of international researchers reflect, for example, on: the way anthropology faces and deals with interdisciplinarity in its encounter with medicine and doctors; the new medical realities and patient strategies that exist in changing medical systems; and the interactions between practice, power and science. The book will appeal to clinicians/practitioners, anthropologists in general, and all those engaged in the interface between medicine and anthropology, but will also be a valuable tool for students of medicine and anthropology who have a special interest in the social realities and interdisciplinarity of health and illness.

Medical Anthropology Facing Medical Realities

The Taste for Knowledge

Claudie Haxaire

The question of the social treatment of the body and its transformations emerges in relation to issues of varying types (economic, therapeutic, ideological, cultural, aesthetic,commercial, technical). This book examines the various ways of managing bodily symptoms or transformations and the social stakes and systems of knowledge which relate to them, both on the medical and social level. The contributions provide analyses that concern a broad range of countries. Through the themes it tackles and the subjects it examines, this book reveals both the universal nature of the questions it asks, and the evolution of the objects and approaches of anthropology itself.

Anthropological Perspectives on their Social and Medical Treatment

Of Bodies and Symptoms

In the era of health democracy, where a patient’s right to be informed is not only widely advocated but also guaranteed by law, what is the real situation regarding patient information? Do patients receive the information that they request with regard to their diagnosis, prognosis or treatments? And what information do patients themselves give to their doctors? Drawing on observational research in hospitals and covering the exchanges between doctors and patients on the subject of cancer treatment and that of other pathologies, this book reveals that the practice of telling lies is widespread amongst parties on both sides of the medical relationship. With attention to the manner in which information of various types is withheld and the truth concealed on either side of the doctor-patient relationship, the author explores the boundaries between what is said and what is left unsaid, and between those who are given information and those who are lied to. Considering the misunderstandings that occur in the course of medical exchanges and the differences between the lies told by doctors and patients, An Anthropology of Lying: Information in the Doctor-Patient Relationship analyses the role of mendacity in the exercise of, and resistance to power. A fascinating study of the mechanisms at work and social conditions surrounding the accomplishment of lying in medical settings, this book casts fresh light on a subject that has so far been overlooked. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists and anthropologists of health and medicine, but also to medical professionals.

Sylvie Fainzang

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