Anthropology and Health

Catalog description

This course introduces you to the area of specialization, medical anthropology. The primary objective is to provide the materials for you to think about health and well-being outside the framework of standard biomedical concepts. Instead, you will examine health and concepts of health as ecological, evolutionary, and cultural systems rather than as merely products of disease dynamics. A second objective is to compare various societies in terms of their patterns of health and disease, their adaptive systems, and their beliefs about illness.