Medical Anthropology

Catalog description

Illness and healing fundamentally shape our sense of the boundaries between nature and culture, life and death, mind and body, self and environment, and human and machine. The central goal of this course is to examine where, how, and why we encounter, challenge, bridge, or sustain these divisions. To pursue this goal, we examine the cultural, social, and political dimensions of biomedicine globally and cross-culturally. We study ethnographic writing as unique methodological and theoretical inroads into these perspectives. Our discussions will draw on both scholarly and popular cultural accounts of the experiential and interpretive aspects of medicine. Course readings introduce you to key concepts in critical medical anthropology, and trace health, illness, and biomedicine through gender, sexuality and race. 001353