Fall 2010

Medical Anthropology

Listed in: Anthropology and Sociology, as ANTH-45

Faculty

Christopher T. Dole (Section 01)

Description

The aim of this course is to introduce the ways that medical anthropologists understand illness, suffering, and healing as taking shape amidst a complex interplay of biological, psychological, social, political-economic, and environmental processes.  The course is designed to engage a broad range of medical anthropology topics, theoretical approaches, and research techniques by examining case studies concerned with such issues as chronic illness and social suffering, ritual and religious forms of healing, illness and inequality, medicalization, the global AIDS crisis, the social life of new medical technologies, and the politics of global health and humanitarian intervention.  A basic premise of the course is that an understanding of illness, health, and the body requires an understanding of the contexts in which they are experienced, contexts contingently shaped by interwoven processes of local, national, and global significance.  Particular emphasis will thus be placed on ethnographic approaches to the lived context in which illness and other forms of suffering are experienced, narrated, and addressed.  Our focus will be comparative, treating illness, suffering, and healing in a range of societies and settings--from Haiti to China, from urban Brazil to rural Nepal, from the townships of South Africa to genetic labs in the United States.

Limited to 30 students.  Fall semester.  Professor C. Dole.

ANTH 45 - L/D

Section 01
M 02:00 PM - 03:20 PM CHAP 201
W 02:00 PM - 03:20 PM CHAP 201

This is preliminary information about books for this course. Please contact your instructor or the Academic Coordinator for the department, before attempting to purchase these books.

ISBN Title Publisher Author(s) Comment Book Store Price
Expressions of the Body TBD
Infections and Inequalities TBD
Letting Them Die TBD
Testing Women, Testing the Fetus TBD
Protest Psychosis TBD
Vita TBD

Offerings

2024-25: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2008, Fall 2009, Fall 2010, Fall 2011, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021