Etica e antropologia medica. Tullio Seppilli e la moralità della scienza

Ethics and medical anthropology. Tullio Seppilli and the morality of science In the vision of Tullio Seppilli, medical anthropology is not only the study of medical representations of the various cultural systems but aims to state the truth about health and disease states, investigating the vast network of their social determinants. Biological determinants and social determinants are not two separate aspects: instead, they are constantly intertwined. Hence the goal, constantly pursued by Seppilli, of overcoming the great disciplinary divide between bio-anthropological sciences and historicalsocial sciences, that is the old nature-history dichotomy, to find a “dialectical unity”. This leads him far from certain trivializations of the criticism of biomedicine, which condemns it as “hegemonic” and “imperialist”, instead valuing medical anthropology as an “alternative”. This article, analyzing different moments of Seppilli’s work, tries to show how for him biomedicine and medical anthropology participate in a common general epistemological foundation, that of the “scientific conception of the world”. His criticism of biomedicine is not being too scientific, but rather being too little: that is, it studies and recognizes only a part of the processes involved in determining health and disease.