Commentary. Tuberculosis, culture and coercion

Culture and aggression-from context to coercion.

This article is an attempt to study the neglected linkages between culture and aggression. It does so by conceptualizing culture as a set of affordances and constraints that channel the expression of coercive means of social control by self and others. All cultural systems represent solutions to the problems associated with distributing desired material and social resources among its group memb...

Commentary: boundaries, culture, and psychotherapy.

COMMENTARY Bounding Culture

Cognitive development is a process from an initial knowledge state at birth to a later mature one. The problem of developmental psychology is to describe and explain the intricacies of this process. In “The Scientist in the Crib”, Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl approach this problem from the perspective of one theory in developmental psychology — the theory theory. The b...

Commentary: 'culture', cultural explanations and causality.

As a medical anthropologist, and thus representative of a discipline that has since the beginning of the 20th century exercised intellectual dominion over the construct of culture as explanatory of the human condition (writ both large and small), I find much in Eckersley’s provocative paper to agree with. I also appreciate his efforts to incorporate cultural explanations into social epidemiolog...

Commentary Tuberculosis: Old problems and new approaches

In New York City from 1985 to 1992, reported cases of tuberculosis rose by more than 20%. This followed a 30-year period of decline in the incidence of the disease. The reasons for the reversal are many and include the role of HIV-1 infection in enhancing disease progression and transmission, homelessness in the city, the emergence of multi-drug-resistant strains of the etiological agent (Mycob...