Health and Inequality ARACHU CASTRO Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, United States Social inequality places populations who are socially disadvantaged—due to economic deprivation, social exclusion, or lack of access to goods or services—at an even greater disadvantage in terms of health status due to diferential exposure and vulnerability to acquiring and developing health conditions, to diferential access to timely diagnosis and treatment, and to the diferential impacts of health conditions on other human development dimensions. Diferences in survival and in timing and frequency in the onset of illness and disability between and within populations are defned as health inequalities. When health inequalities stem from broader social and economic inequalities and prevent individuals and communities from achieving their best health potential, health inequalities are referred to as health inequities. Medical anthropologists have developed biosocial, biocultural, and political– economic models that elucidate the roots and mechanisms that create and reproduce health inequities. Tese models include the study of local environments (such as abso- lute deprivation and nutrition, environmental quality, the built environment, exposure to violence, and health care resources), social connectedness (including social support, levels of trust, social alienation and isolation, community engagement, and relative deprivation and cultural consonance), and physical and psychosocial stress across the life course (Dressler et al. 2014; Leatherman and Jernigan 2014). Tese models also include the study of the intergenerational transmission—or biosocial inheritance—of responses to stress and social adversity (Leatherman and Jernigan 2014), such as racism (Castro, Savage, and Kaufman 2015; Gravlee 2009); the interaction of various health conditions (syndemics) that result from health inequalities (Singer 2009); and the historical, socioeconomic, and political etiology of disease and constrained agency (Farmer 1999). All of these models have contributed to the understanding of health inequities as the product of social inequalities, as opposed to approaches limited to understanding diferences in health outcomes that result from proximal risk factors or behaviors, which ofen assume similar levels of individual agency within and across populations. Living with economic deprivations and experiencing various forms of social exclusion exacerbate the probability of becoming ill and obstruct access to and use of quality health care—all of which can lead to premature death. Low socioeconomic position or relative poverty—but not limited to absolute poverty—can lead to low cultural consonance, defned as “the degree to which individuals approximate, in their own beliefs and behaviors, the prototypes for belief and behavior encoded in shared cultural models” (Dressler et al. 2014, 220). Low sense of coherence and unsatisfying social interactions lead to individuals experiencing disregard by others, which in turn Te International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2212