Psyche: Culture and Power

Catalog description

How does the world shape our minds? Organized around this central question, this course examines how cultural milieus, social structures, and historical contexts have shaped the thoughts, feelings, and desires of people living in different times and places. Have people always and everywhere felt anger? How does speaking different languages shape how we sense the world? Where Western psychiatric diagnoses are absent or insufficient, how is “mental illness” interpreted and experienced? How do unequal economic and political systems shape our psyches, and our very understanding of how the psyche operates? To examine the question of the relation between mind and world, this course puts psychological anthropology into conversation with social and cultural psychology, history, social theory, philosophy, and film.