Changing biocultural perspectives on health in the Andes

New directions toward biocultural approaches to health and illness in Andean peoples have emerged since the original Health in the Andes volume was published in 1981. The reformulation of these perspectives was stimulated in part by the growth of political-economic perspectives in Andean ethnography and by critiques of medical ecology by critical medical anthropologists. This paper provides a brief history of changing biocultural perspectives on Andean health, and contrasts two projects dealing with Andean biology and health carried out in the 1960s and 1980s in the District of Nuñoa in Southern Peru. The recent Nuñoa research provides one example of a more critical biocultural approach that attempts to integrate perspectives from ecology and anthropological political economy. The utility of the approach is explored through the Nuñoa case study, which focused on the reproduction of illness and poverty in Andean households in contexts of social and economic change. Findings of this research are compared with recent work in the Andes to illustrate how a more critical biocultural perspective can better articulate with the diversity of approaches in medical anthropology and Andean health studies.