Commentary: ‘Culture’, cultural explanations and causality

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Abstract
As a medical anthropologist, and thus representative of a discipline that has since the beginning of the 20th century exercised intellectual dominion over the construct of culture as explanatory of the human condition (writ both large and small), I find much in Eckersley's provocative paper to agree with. I also appreciate his efforts to incorporate cultural explanations into social epidemiology. In so doing he has given the field a needed theoretical push to move beyond a narrow focus on social and economic relationships to consideration of systems of meaning in the causation of disease.