Medical Anthropology

Catalog description

The single largest economic sector in the world, with unparalleled cultural authority to compel populations to participate, medicine has life altering effects on human bodies and subjectivities across the globe. Ethnographers have generated far ranging critical analysis of how these effects unfold, what drives them and what is societally at stake. In order to illustrate the scope of ethnographers’ insights into medicine(s) as cultural systems, this seminar employs exemplars of these insights, from the meanings of medicine to the role of medicine in colonial and missionary projects, from the cultural construction of race and gender to the nature of political economy and of the body itself.