The Search for a Cause: An Anthropological Perspective on a Neurological Disease in Guam, Western Pacific

In this anthropological study of a neurodegenerative disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis/Parkinsonism-Dementia Complex (ALS/PDC) in Guam, Western Pacific, Verena Keck intertwines three separate perspectives of history, medicine, and anthropology.

The book is an important contribution to the long overdue decolonizing of biomedical research and argues that neurological diseases can be better understood if they are seen, too, as social and cultural phenomena.

With sound ethnography linked to current, controversial debates in neurology, the author breaks new ground; her insights add to the hitherto few anthropological studies of neurodegenerative diseases in non-Western societies.

• Verena Keck, Author