SW 216-AN - Medical Anthropology

Min Units: 3
Max Units: 3
Medical anthropology examines beliefs and practices about sickness, healing, and the body in a cross-cultural and global perspective. This course will focus on such topics such as cultural constructions of the body, theories of disease causation, beliefs about healing and decacy, reproductive technologies, medicalization and risk, pharmaceuticals, emerging infectious diseases, and international public health. In exploring these topics we will think about medical anthropology as a discipline concerned with the production of truths about bodies and environments. How are such truths produced across cultures, medical systems and different historical periods? Such a conception of the field puts into question the hegemony of biomedicine without devaluing its ongoing contribution to human life. We will therefore be interested in the intersection of biology and culture in a variety of contexts and the ongoing dialogue between anthropology and biomedicine. Our key questions: What is medical anthropology? How do anthropologists investigate and respond to the study of pain, illness, suffering, and healing in global contexts? How do seemingly local and global cultural processes shape aspects of our bodies, such as illness, sex, and death? (U) Annually, term varies