This is a review of a research line present in Brazilian social science studies about health and illness, characterized by a methodological emphasis in the cultural distinction between relational models of the "person" and the modern Western model of the "individual" (conceived as free, autonomous and equal). That distinction is particularly important for the perception of different forms of the experience of health and illness, mostly between working classes in modern national societies and the social segments responsible for biomedical knowledge, as a learned, dominant or official ideology. This knowledge is fundamentally related to the ideology of individualism, in its universalistic/rationalistic and physicalist/scientificist guises. The complex set of representations, practices and institutions derived from it are systematically opposed to the integrated, embedded and relational condition of the experience of illness (or of "physical-moral disturbances", as I prefer) mostly within those groups where hierarchical, relational, models of the "person" prevail. I evoke the anthropological grounds for this perspective of analysis and describe some of the aspects of the academic production related to it, in comparison with other tendencies in the field.
Hierarchy; Culture; Health; Individualism; Personhood