Cultural, psychological, and biological aspects of the definitions, causes, symptoms, and treatment of illness. Comparative study of medical systems, practitioners, and patients.

The field of medical anthropology has long seen medicine as a site of encounter, at once both intimately lived and broadly scaled. But the way this encounter has been understood has changed quite a bit from the field’s inception in the mid 20th century. Medical anthropology had its beginnings as a field geared towards helping medical practitioners and public health workers better understand and negotiate gaps between medical knowledge and cultural or even personal beliefs. Culture and cultural differences were important to understand, but they were often understood as an obstacle, or a source of resistance that had to be overcome (“why do [x people] refuse to boil their drinking water?”). Subsequent critical approaches, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, turned to economics and politics rather than a deterministic notion of culture, to understand the “social” or structural causes of disease and experiences of suffering. In the process, anthropologists argued that biomedicine itself is also suffused with culture, politics, and power. The effects of global epidemics (eg HIV/AIDS), the rise of pharmaceuticalization, and transformations in public health in the name of “global health” have further transformed the political, economic, and experiential topographies of health, illness, and intervention, and the questions that anthropologists ask about them. This course offers an intensive introduction to medical anthropology through these key shifts in problems and approaches.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills