This month, I am writing from Paris as part of a meeting on medical communications in Geneva. In traveling, I have given some thought to different cultural and environmental variables that affect men’s health globally. Numerous French anthropologists have long been interested in the role of culture in shaping human behavior and health. Marcel Mauss, founder of the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Paris, studied human societies as total systems, self-regulating and adaptive to changing circumstances in ways designed to preserve the integrity of the system. Mauss exerted considerable influence over such disparate figures as Claude Levi-Strauss in France and Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown in England. These early anthropologists pointed out the health promoting properties of traditional cultures in which there were few of the stressors that increase male mortality today and their work inspired much of the artistic and creative counter-culture that thrived in Paris in the first half of the 1900s.

However it is not until recent years that anthropologists have pulled together bio-cultural data to develop solid theories on the anthropology of men’s health. The key discovery of anthropologists on men’s health focuses on the greater risk of men for dying from a variety of causes and the bio-cultural drivers of this tendency. A recent study by Kruger and Nesse (2004) provides the basis for this review drawing on pioneering cultural and bio-behavioral research in 20 countries. By better understanding the anthropology of men’s health, we can move towards a more holistic, less pharmacologically based, approach to male health problems.