Ane Straume (Master Student)

Ane.Straume@student.uib.no

Research interest
 
I have always been intrigued by the field of medicine. Medicine, health and illness is something that concerns all humans in the world. At some point we will all get sick and we will all find ways to deal with it. When I first started studying I did a one year long course in medicine. I found the science of medicine very fascinating, but what was even more interesting to me was the human and cultural aspect of health and illness. How does a person recognize that he or she is sick? When is a person healthy? All people in the world have to deal with health and illness and we all have different ways of dealing with it. Age, gender, culture, available technology and economy are just some of the factors involved in this process. So after my year of medicine I started studying anthropology, focusing on medical anthropology, a field that deals with the questions in the medical realm that I find so interesting.

In my bachelor paper,  “Health development in a cultural, political and economical context” I focus on malaria in Melanesia in order to argue that medical systems of various cultures and areas of the world are constructed and understood by their populations in fundamentally different ways.
The research done in my bachelor paper became the foundation of what is now becoming my master thesis. The fieldwork for my master thesis have involved a 6 month long stay in a rural Solomon Island village where my main focus has been their local medical system, the biomedical healthcare system they have available and how the population of this village deal with health and illness.