Body and the Materiality of Illness: Archaeology of an Unknown experience

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 MA graduate, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran.

Abstract

Since the first man appeared on Earth, illness -as a significant part of bio-bodies has played a key role in life. As the host, the body forms and experiences the existent illness through different periods of life. Though it is not necessarily experienced by the person or the life itself. Yet what is the illness? And what is its nature? For a qualitative understanding of illness and its nature, a cancer patient was studied in the present article, employing different but coherent methods of qualitative research including observation, interview, and the examination of material documents. We attempted to comprehend the illness using common definitions of health in contrast to the illness and experience of pain as evidence of the past illness from the prospect of objective presence of the illness and its material signs. The material aspects of the phenomenon of illness were studied as it is performed in medicine. The studies indicate that despite the notion about understanding the nature of illness through lived experience in anthropology, its nature is independent which is not necessarily in the framework of health and a nearly healthy life; But the nature of illness is formed from the view of death and its existence is separated from the existence of the body.

Keywords

Iranian Journal of Anthropological Research
Volume 8, Issue 2 - Serial Number 16
Indexing Databases
March 2019
Pages 145-165

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