Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Margaret Lock’s research focuses on a comparative anthropology of medicine and biomedical technologies. Lock initially researched the 20th century revival of the indigenous Japanese medical system that continues to proliferate to the present day.
Her book Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America, published in 1993 by the University of California Press, won six prizes including the Staley Prize of the School of American Research, the Canada-Japan Book Prize, and the Wellcome Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.
After a trip to Japan, Lock made a career switch and commenced her training in anthropology at Berkeley, culminating in 1976 in a Doctor of Philosophy in cultural anthropology.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock reported a case where, after hearing the story of a woman under tremendous personal stress, medical students a. advised her to adhere to the prescription regimen. b. questioned the veracity of the doctor's diagnosis.
In Japan, menopause is looked upon as a natural life-stage, and the very word for menopause, konenki, means renewal, season and energy. In India, menopause is also approached as a natural stage of life that comes with many benefits.
Among the women, residents of Denmark, Sweden and Norway were most likely to report that going through menopause turned out better than they expected, while participants living in the U.S., U.K., France and Canada were more prone to find menopause much worse than they had anticipated.
More generally, local biologies refers to the way in which the embodied experience of physical sensations, including those of well-being, health, and illness, is in part informed by the material body, itself contingent on evolutionary, environmental, social and individual variables.
On the basis of such an approach, I reached the conclusion in the early 1990s that part of our task is to recognize “local biologies,” that is, biological difference among people that results from bodily responses to differing environments over time and across space.
The stigma of menopause, with its associations of hysteria and incompetence, the shame of ageing, and the taboo about revealing menopausal symptoms, compounds the distress and struggle.
Menopause can result from: Naturally declining reproductive hormones. As you approach your late 30s, your ovaries start making less estrogen and progesterone — the hormones that regulate menstruation — and your fertility declines.
Biological anthropology. The study of humans as biological organisms, considered in an evolutionary framework; sometimes called physical anthropology (origin of modern species/biological variation)
Cultural anthropologists study how people who share a common cultural system organize and shape the physical and social world around them, and are in turn shaped by those ideas, behaviors, and physical environments. Cultural anthropology is hallmarked by the concept of culture itself.
Social Anthropology is the comparative study of the ways in which people live in different social and cultural settings across the globe. Societies vary enormously in how they organise themselves, the cultural practices in which they engage, as well as their religious, political and economic arrangements.