care systems and the contributions of health ideas and practices in reinforcing inequalities in the wider society. Moreover, CMA addresses the social origins of illness, such as the way in which poverty, discrimination, industrial pollution of the environment, social violence, and fear of violence contribute to poor health. Critical medical anthropologists argue that experience and “agency,” that is, individual and group decision making and action, are constructed and reconstructed in the action arena between socially constituted categories of meaning and the political-economic forces that shape the context [and texture] of daily life. In other words, people develop their own individual and collective understandings and responses to illness and to other threats to their well-being, but they do so in a world that is not of their own making, a world in which inequality of access to health care, the media, productive resources (e.g., land, potable water, clean air), and valued social statuses play a significant role in their daily options. Additionally, while recognizing the fundamental importance of physical (including biological) reality in health, such as the nature of particular pathogens or the release of toxins into the environment, CMA emphasizes the fact that it is not merely the idea of “nature”—the way external reality is conceived and related to by humans—but also the very physical shape of nature, including human biology, that has been deeply influenced by an evolutionary history of social inequality, overt and covert social conflict, and the operation of both physical power and the power to shape dominant ideas and conceptions in society and internationally through processes of globalization, control of production and reproduction, and control of labor. References DRAFT ENTRY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PUBLIC HEALTH (in press) Entry: Anthropology in Public Health Author: Kathleen M. MacQueen at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the Body (The research group that comprises the UCB side of Joint UCB/UCSF Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology) at UC Berkeley Merrill Singer and Hans Baer. Critical Medical Anthropology. Amityville, New York: Baywood Publishing Co., 1995. Hans Baer, Merrill Singer and Ida Susser. Medical Anthropology and the World System. Westport, CT: Merrill Singer, Ed. The Political Economy of AIDS. Amityville, New York: Baywood Publishing Co., 1998. Arachu Castro and Merrill Singer, Eds. Unhealthy Health Policy: A Critical Anthropological Examination. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004. Merrill Singer. The Face of Social Suffering: Life History of a Street Drug Addict.