Writing at the Margin : University of California Press : 9780520209657 : 0520209656 : 18 Aug 1997 : One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems?for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain?are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to mor