During the study of medicine from an anthropological point of view, several themes recur regularly. These include the body and its representation, meaning and a person's response to that meaning, and finally, the symbolic images that construct and shape both meaning and bodily representation. Each of these themes is addressed in medical anthropology texts and is related and builds on one another in various ways. The body is the site of medicine, because the body is the site of all cultural practices. As Byron Good says, “medicine shapes the human body and disease in culturally distinct ways.” (Good, 65) It is the cultural fashion of Western medicine to objectify the body by constructing it in purely biochemical and molecular terms. As Shiehisa Kuriyama shows us in his work, this is the result of the historical development of Greek medicine and its intersection with Western scientific sentiment. Kuriyama says that “conceptions of the body owe as much to particular uses of the senses as to particular “ways of thinking.” » (Kuriyama, 12). He goes on to explain how a tradition of empiricism and a belief that “only speech can provide clear understanding; [figurative speech] is profoundly unreliable” (Kuriyama, 75), influenced the development of Western medical culture. With the obsession with clear and unambiguous language came a set of presuppositions which, among other things, created a hierarchy of bodily representation. Kuriyama describes this in terms of Western obsessions with muscularity or a Chinese emphasis on the appearance of skin. When the West undertook its various imperialist projects around the world, this hierarchy of...... middle of paper......sm for a lack of modernity. The villagers were acutely aware of what the shaman represented not only to their own culture, but also to those in the transnational space, and their conception changed because of this. We thus see how medical anthropology studies and analyzes questions of the body, bodily perception and representation of the body, as well as meaning and symbolism. We also see how medical anthropology takes these interpretations and uses them to critique the practices of the system. The biomedical system largely ignores the social aspects of illness, which does a disservice to the suffering individual it seeks to restore. It emphasizes a biological reductionism that limits the care it can provide to the person it reconstructs as a patient and, in doing so, it neglects the multiple meanings that medical symbols can have for the patient...