1 - Sex, gender and health: integrating biological and social perspectives

Summary

From male and female to men and women

The primary aim of this volume is to show how both biological and social anthropologists have sought to explain the reasons that underlie well-documented differences in the health experiences of men and women. By improving our understanding of the origins of the differences in health experiences between men and women, we hope to achieve greater insight into the processes generating ill-health for everyone. We can also begin to address imbalances in the diagnosis of disease and subsequent treatments which have generally favoured men but which have occasionally advantaged women.

A second aim is to help bring social and biological anthropologists together. Too often they fail to communicate with one another. In particular, we wish to illustrate the extent to which the field of health research is one which benefits immensely from improved cooperation between social and biological scientists. The first step in such a process must be for each sub-discipline to look beyond its own paradigm to acknowledge the value of others. We hope that we have furthered these goals by inviting a diverse group of contributors to examine a selection of important issues regarding the health of men and women. With its emphasis on holism and on examining human cultures from a wide range of analytical perspectives, anthropology is one of the few fields which can claim to address these issues from both biological and social perspectives under a single disciplinary rubric.

Throughout this volume, beginning with its title, we highlight the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ because these terms refer to two different aspects of the human experience.