Medical Anthropology

Recommended Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of migrations and migration flows. Basic knowledge of the contributes sociology and anthropology have made for understanding the migration phenomenon on contemporary societies.

Basic knowledge of the social studies of sciences and medicine.

Basic knowledge of the contributes critical medical anthropology has made for psychiatric theory and practices.

Basic information about the “colonial age” of cultural psychiatry.

Teaching Methods

Lectures with students’ participation.

PowerPoint presentation, videos and other pedagogical material.

Learning Outcomes

How important are biographic elements and life stories when analyzing the migratory process.

How important are historical, social and cultural aspects within the clinical context, concerning migratory process.

To learn about the importance of both social science studies and biomedicine. To recognize biomedicine limits and objectives as an explanatory theory.

Concerning Psychiatry, to critically explore diagnostic theory in an anthropological perspective.

To learn about the colonial elements in a historical and anthropological perspective.

To think over the contribution of anthropology to bioethics.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

Bioethics and cultural relativism (Professor António Barbosa)

1. Sanitary practices and cultural relativism

2. Double standard in biomedical research

 

Culture and psychiatric diagnosis (Professor Chiara Pussetti)

 

Biographical research, migrations and health: theoretical and practical implications (Professor Elsa Lechner)

When immigrants and household care providers meet, clinical questions are punctuated by decisive social, historical and cultural factors, such as the vulnerability of the status immigrants hold vis-à-vis the State (as regards documentation); heritage of a common colonial past manifested in asymmetric conditions (colonizer and colonized); symbolic and linguistic references of the one who seeks and the one who provides medical care (languages, culture, therapeutic culture, medical traditions, worldviews).

Even prior to the actual institutional setting (hospitals, appointments, medication), the suffering of the migrants presents itself as a breeding ground for a better understanding of the different contexts in which symptoms of malaises arise, intensify or decrease, end or linger. In order to understand these contexts, a direct contact with the migrants is needed, so that their life stories and biographical context can be analyzed.

This module provides a theoretical and practical analysis of the contribution Biographic Research has made to the study of migrations and health. We will review the current state of the art of Biographic Research in its increasingly multidisciplinary context, carry out a deep analysis of concrete cases taken from our research area and undertake a critical reflection on the theory of this practice from the specific standpoint of mental health.

The module might be complemented by an experimental workshop so that students may experience the forming, transforming and civic effects of working with life stories.

 

 

Psychopathology and society: ethnographic approaches (Professor João Vasconcelos)

This curricular unit aims at exploring the interrelations between psychopathology and society and promoting critical reflection on the universal nature of psychiatric nosology. Are the nosological categories of our psychiatric tradition directly translatable to other cultural traditions? Is a direct translation of depression, history and schizophrenia as soul loss, spiritual possession and mystic ecstasy analytically accurate? Do different languages merely put different labels on the same diseases? Or does language features as an implicit characteristic of the disease itself? And, if so, to what extent? As regards the basic comprehension of different emotional and psychosomatic states? As regards the subjective experience of these states and social responses to these states? Or according to a more radically etiological perspective, in which the constituency of the disease itself is involved? These questions will be answered based on the readings and discussion of four anthropological dissertations in which this issue is explored with particular ethnographic emphasis, taken from different sociocultural settings.

 

Anthropology of Biomedicine (Professor Luís Quintais)

The Anthropology of Biomedicine course aims at exploring together with the students a set of topics related to one of the ground-breaking areas of anthropologic studies. Fundamentally, this research area focuses on biomedicine, i.e. the widely disseminated medical theory and practice of Euro-American societies, as a breeding ground for discussion on (western) medicine.

One of the most important features of biomedicine is its claim of a systematized organization. Biomedicine practitioners believe that its field of action holds autonomy. In other words, biomedicine practice is grounded on the idea that its field of action is discreet, with no significant sociocultural worth. This double claim of systematic organization and neutrality stands uncorrected. By admitting the relevance of the role sociocultural factors play on biomedical theory and practice, we overtly and covertly admit that biomedicine is an artifact. Its artifactual nature leads us to believe that biomedicine is founded upon a moral, symbolic and social matrix that needs further exploration. In this sense, biomedicine is an ethno-medicine, or a socioculturally conditioned way of thinking and acting. Thus, it is also important to consider the extensions and recursiveness suggested by this artefactual dimension.

Assessment Methods

Continuous
Synthesis work: 100.0%

Bibliography

Elsa Lechner (Org.) (2009). Histórias de Vida: Olhares Interdisciplinares. Edições Afrontamento.

Lewis, Ioan M. 2003. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession [3rd edition]. Londres e Nova Iorque: Routledge.
Littlewood, Roland. 1993. Pathology and Identity: The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Littlewood, Roland. 2002. Pathologies of the West: An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Europe and America. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2001. Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland [20th anniversary edition, updated and expanded]. Berkeley: University of California Press.

DUMIT, Joseph, 2004, Picturing Personhood: brain scans and biomedical identity, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
FLECK, Ludwik, 1991 (1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago & Londres, The University of Chicago Press, pp.20-51.
FOUCAULT, Michel, 1994 (1976), A Vontade de Saber História da Sexualidade I, Lisboa, Relógio d’ Água, pp. 135-61.
FRANKLIN, Sarah, 1995, ―Science as Culture, Cultures of Science‖, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, pp.163-84.
GONZALEZ, Roberto J., Laura Nader, e C. Jay Ou, 1995, ―Between Two Poles: Bronislaw Malinowski, Ludwik Fleck, and the Anthropology of Science‖, Current Anthropology, 36, 5, pp.866-869.
GOOD, Byron J., 1995 (1994), Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: an anthropological perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.1-24 e pp.65-87.
HAHN, Robert A., 1983, ―Biomedical Practice and Anthropological Theory: frameworks and directions‖, Annual Review of Anthropology, 12, pp.305-333.
HARAWAY, Donna J., 1991, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the reinvention of nature, Londres, Free Association Books Ltd, pp.149-181.
KLEINMAN, Arthur, 1995, ―What is specific to biomedicine‖, in Writing at the Margin: discourse between anthropology and medicine, Berkeley, LA, e Londres: University of California Press, pp. 21-40.
LAMBERT, Helen, 1996, ―Medical Anthropology‖, in BARNARD, Allan & Jonathan SPENCER (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Londres e Nova Iorque, Routledge, pp.358-361.
LATOUR, Bruno, 1986 (1979), Laboratory Life: the construction of scientific facts, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, pp. 15- 90.
MOL, Annemarie, 2002, The body Multiple: ontology in medical practice, Durham & Londres: Duke University Press.
RABINOW, Paul, 1996a, ―Artificiality and Enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality‖, in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp.91-111.