Course Description:

In this course, students will be encouraged to develop a broad understanding of medical anthropology, one of the newest, largest, and fastest growing subfields of cultural anthropology. Drawing from theoretical and ethnographic material and from detailed case studies from the U.S., Haiti, Peru, and Guatemala, we will examine a number of topics in medical anthropology, including applied, interpretive, and critical medical anthropological approaches and practices. Through reading and evaluating a wide range of both classical and contemporary publications in medical anthropology, we will explore the different kinds of questions that medical anthropologists ask, the research methods they use to answer those questions, and the insights (theoretical, moral, and practical) that these insights provide.

Throughout the course, our discussions will focus on how people from different societies and cultures understand health, illness, and healing, including studying different cultural healing practices and beliefs as well as the social origins and consequences of illness and disease. Questions we will investigate together include: How do cultures and societies interact with people’s physical environments to cause health problems and/or influence the spread of illness and disease? How do economic and political structures and inequalities help shape people’s health, their access to quality health care, and the distribution of illness and disease within and across different societies? How do people in different cultures and societies label, describe, and experience illness and offer meaningful responses to individual and communal distress?

Course Goals:

• To guide students in developing a strong and broad foundation in the subfield of medical anthropology, including the study of biocultural adaptations to disease, ethnomedical systems, and cultural factors in health and access to healthcare.

• To emphasize how beliefs about health, illness, and medicine are culturally created, and how understanding the cultural dimensions of health and illness can help make healing more effective.

• To examine how people’s health status and their access to quality health care as well as the distribution of illness and disease are always intimately connected to larger issues of politics and socio-economic inequalities.

• To understand how healing systems can help provide meaning to people who are suffering from illness and disease, which can itself be a powerful form of healing.

• To give students an opportunity to apply the theoretical and methodological concepts learned in class by developing and carrying out an original ethnographic or archival final research project on a topic of their own choosing.