AN 370 - Anthropology of Africa, Medicine and Technology

Min Units: 3
Max Units: 3
Africa is not a country - it is a complex continent with 54 countries and hundreds of languages that has always been a significant part of world history. Western perspectives of Africa tend to be negative - Africans are corrupt, poor, diseased. In this course we will tackle these flat understandings of Africa via disease, health and healing, paying careful attention to the body and technology as we do so. Since my training is in anthropology we will be working to understand etic perspectives (outside the social group) and emic (within the social group). As we do this, we will be exploring larger questions like: What is health? What is medicine? How are these concepts universal? How are they culturally defined? We will explore these questions through a couple of different modules:

Foundations and Representations - what is the significance of Western representations of Africans, especially around disease? How can we recognize and be ethical about our representations of others? What is culture? What is medical anthropology? How can we understand different systems of health and healing? - what happens when different systems of health and healing encounter one another? What is biomedicine and what does it look like in Africa?
Ethnography and epidemics - what does cancer look like in Botswana? How do concepts of the body and the social world affect experiences of pain, healing and treatment?
Medical Research and Clinical Trials- we will read an ethnography about a medical school in Malawi that will help us think about how people think about healing and the intersection of Western biomedicine with other social worlds.

(U) Occasionally