What is medical anthropology?
Medical anthropologists study how culture and society shape health, illness and the body. Medical anthropology reveals the diverse approaches to healing and the range of different experiences and understandings of illness and health that exist cross culturally.
Medical anthropology offers important insights necessary for addressing today’s health and wellbeing challenges. Scholars explore how political structures and economic systems shape or limit people’s access to healthcare, and examine whether people always experience disease, illness and recovery in the ways that medicine predicts. Medical anthropologists help us to see how perceptions of the body and health have changed over time, and explain how global forces, such as colonization, the global economy, migration, and transnational media, get under our skin to shape our experiences of wellbeing and illness.
Medical anthropologists working in Aotearoa research a wide range of topics, from childhood asthma to living with hemophilia, from reproductive technologies, disability and genetics, to occupational overuse syndrome, and from the wellbeing needs of the homeless, to the ongoing health impacts of historical trauma.
What is SOMAA?
Formed in 2016 SOMAA is a national collective for medical anthropologists working in or on Aotearoa. We share news and developments in our field, arrange events, maintain an email list, support emerging scholars, and connect academic research to a public audience. We are currently seeking to become an official section of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand.
SOMAA is run by a committee of elected volunteers. We hold an annual AGM at the ASAA/NZ conference.
Joining SOMAA
We welcome new members and membership is free. To join SOMAA simply fill in the contact form under the ‘contact’ tab of this website, and send us a message. Please put the word “membership” in the comment section. You will be alerted to any upcoming events by email and will be invited to attend public events, and can join the email discussion list. Graduate student members are eligible to be considered for any prizes or awards offered by the Society.
Find SOMAA on Facebook here
Website image acknowledgements:
Banner image: R. Magnus and S.C.M. Sowton; Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie 63, 255,1910
SOMAA 
