Medical Anthropology

Catalog description

This course will explore the ways in which different cultures conceptualize the body and its relation to the physical, social, and supernatural environments. We will examine how illness and its causes are understood, investigating not only the beliefs and practices surrounding healing, but also the social position and training of the healers themselves. In order to understand the context of healing in cross-cultural perspective, we will problematize the boundaries between medicine and other arenas of social life: religion, politics, law, economics, etc. We will investigate issues of medical efficacy (what "works"?) by asking who or what is being healed in different kinds of medical practices, and we will consider the ways in which power and social control are exerted through medical discourses of various sorts. Finally, we will examine the history of medical anthropology from its "clinical" origins in international development, through anthropological critiques of clinical perspectives, to attempts to fuse clinical and critical approaches. Throughout the course, Western medical practice will be analyzed as one of many forms of ethnomedicine and ethnopsychology.