Anthropology and Global Health

Recommended Prerequisites

Graduation. 

Teaching Methods

In classes there are theoretical and practical exposure of the main themes of the course; there is discussion on the different approaches present medical anthropology together with viewing films and documentaries to illustrate the issues addressed.  

Learning Outcomes

This course is an introduction to anthropology of health and the new paradigm of Global Public health. It is intended to alert the student to the myriad of factors in addition to physical and biological processes that shape the perception and experience of illness and misfortune and shaping diagnoses, subsequent use of various medical traditions of healing, conceived in a sense broader than the simply biological.

The analysis of case studies will address the main theories paying particular attention to the thematic experience of illness, suffering, misfortune and the various medical traditions used by populations in developing and Western contexts. It will also unveil the emergence of a new paradigm of Global Health, consequence of the steeping of globalization and rise of new actors that changed the landscape of international health.Ultimately it intends to provide instruments to improve the public health programs.  

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

It will be studied how the complexity of health/bodily problems - sickness, suffering or misfortune - are experienced and how these define therapeutic choices. Concepts of health/disease, body / mind, stigma and risk, community and non-biological explanatory models are studied in order to grasp the importance of culture in problematic situations.
When considering the cultural and historical nature of medical traditions, it will be favored a diachronic analysis of (vertical and horizontal) programs biomedical and/or research in developing contexts aimed to better understand the complexity of the situations where 'new' global actors are entangled in old structural hierarchies (colonial medicine to global health).

The relationship between the local / global view is through the study of pandemics such as HIV-AIDS, malaria, TB, diseases of poverty, neglected, as well as new biomedical research in different geographical contexts.  

Head Lecturer(s)

Jorge Filipe Sousa Varanda Preces Ferreira

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Research work: 100.0%

Bibliography

1.   Good, Byron J., et al., 2010, A Reader in Medical Anthropology, Wiley-Blackwell: London.

2.  Hahn, R.A. (ed), 1999 Anthropology in Public Health-Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3.  Feierman S. and Jazen J.(ed), 1992 - The social basis of health and healing in Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press.

4.  Ellen E. Foley, 2010, Your Pocket is What Cures You: The Politics of Health in Senegal, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

5.  Justice, J., 1986, Policies, Plans, and People: foreign aid and health development, Berkeley, University of California Press.

6.  Cueto, Marcos. 2007. Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955- 1975. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

7. Farmer, Paul, 2010, Partner to the Poor.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

8. Petryna, Adriana. 2009. When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

9. Giles-Vernick,T.; Webb, J, 2013,  Global Health in Africa, Ohio Press

10. Prince; Marsland,R, 2014, Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa, Ohio Pres.