HONORS MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: METHODS & PRACTICE 4

Catalog description

Introduction to medical anthropology, a subfield of the discipline of anthropology that seeks to understand and highlight how health, illness, and healing practices are culturally constructed and mediated. Students investigate global, cross-cultural, and local issues related to health, sickness, healing, epidemiology, aging, and dying from an applied and biocultural perspective, using anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork methods. Students are exposed to diverse cultural interpretations of health, sickness, and healing, the importance of viewing medical systems as social systems, understanding the socio-cultural context of medical decision making and therapy management, the principles of cultural competency, and the recurrent and ongoing problems of socioeconomic inequality and ecological disruptions that have an impact upon the differential distribution and treatment of human diseases. As an honors course, it is a full thematic seminar with advanced teaching methods focusing on major writing, reading, and research assignments, student class lectures, group discussions and interactions.