A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health

A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health presents a collection of readings that explore from the perspective of medical anthropology – the interface of humans and the environment in the shaping of health and illness around the world.

Featuring contributions from noted scholars in medical anthropology, environmental and public health studies, and related fields in the social sciences, this timely volume gets to the root of such broad concerns as to the reasons why humans degrade their environments, the resulting threats to health, societal distribution of environmental health problems, efforts of communities to limit these problems, and the very future of global human health. 

An initial series of readings offer critical perspectives on the latest theoretical and methodological advancements in the field of environmental health and illness. Chapters then proceed to cover a variety of topics related to the core themes of eco–biosocial interactions and health, political ecology and health, adverse feedback loops in environmental health, the growing number of multiple ( pluralea) adverse environmental interactions, and ecosyndemics – the environmental conditions that promote deleterious interactions among diseases. Reflecting the most recent international ethnographic research, A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health is an essential resource to issues related to the increasing importance of the complex interactions between human health and the environment in the 21st–century. 

Merrill Singer is Professor of Anthropology and Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut. He has published more than 275 articles and book chapters, and authored or edited 29 books. Dr. Singer is a recipient of the Rudolph Virchow Professional Prize, the George Foster Memorial Award for Practicing Anthropology, the AIDS and Anthropology Paper Prize, the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, the Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association and the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group s Distinguished Service Award.