Anthropology of Medicine

Catalog description

How do social, cultural, and political forces shape health as well as understandings and experiences of the body and practices of caring for it? Medical anthropology is the sub-field of anthropology devoted to the interaction of biological, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic factors that impact disease and illness. We will engage work that studies biomedicine itself as a sociocultural system. We will explore how medical practitioners come to see their patients, explore practices of producing medical knowledge and technological intervention, and consider what it is like to be a subject of biomedical practice and healing. In doing so, we will discuss theories of the role of power, culture, history, and identity in illness, healing, and disease, reading core texts that critically ground medical anthropology today and inform contemporary understandings of clinical ethics. This course heavily engages ethnographic materials in its exploration of culture and society, considering a broad range of health-related experiences, discourses, knowledge, and practice among different cultures and along the hierarchy of power. Topics include diverse concepts of disease etiology and healing practice; theories of embodiment and somatization; ethnomedicine, medical pluralism, and (bio)medicalization; structural violence, inequalities, and social suffering; political and moral economies of global health and medical humanitarianism; HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases; and effects of new medical technologies on how we live and die.