Introduction to Medical Anthropology

Recommended Prerequisites

NA

Teaching Methods

  The texts present in the syllabus match the themes covered in lectures. In classes students will invigorate the discussion or by working group thus allowing the emergence of different experiences and perspectives. The intention is to promote the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and the building of stronger academic arguments.  

Learning Outcomes

  The course will introduce students to the main theories and concepts of medical anthropology. It will emphasise analysis of processes such as health, disease, key-concepts/instruments such as stigma, medical pluralism, therapeutic management group and itinerary and structural violence. It will highlight the conceptualisation of disease into a broader context where cultural, social, political, economic and historical factors are intertwined and bring to the fore how the local experience of disease often relates to global structures.

At the end the student should have an understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of medical anthropology; its methodological instruments; grasp the main theoretical and key-concepts; see the differences and similarities between biomedicine and other medical traditions; seize the relevance of social, culture, political, economic and structural factors for the experience of disease and inequality in its incidence and availably of biomedical therapeutics.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

It will tackle how social, cultural, economic, political factor shape illness while molding use of medical traditions, biomedicine included, broader negotiation of healing. It will consider biomedicine has historically constructed science and relevance of its theories/practices to global use/expansion. Focus on grasping that inequalities of healthy/ill-health and access to, or lack of, relevant expert healing resources relates to lasting histories of power relations rather that go beyond vulnerability, lifestyle or risk behavior.Themes studied include theories of disease, illness, role of kin/community: managing distress, placebo effect, healing process, efficacy problem; political economy and distribution of health; causes, consequences; role of biomedicine in construction of colonial body and how colonial programs formed basis for global health. At the end global-local relation is retaken via study of epidemics and new biomedical research carried out in several geographic contexts. 

Head Lecturer(s)

Cristina Maria Proença Padez

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Frequency: 50.0%
Synthesis work: 50.0%

Bibliography

 Biehl, J. 2007, Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fadiman, Anne. 1998, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. NY, Noonday Press.

Farmer, Paul. 2004, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Feierman, S.; Jazen, J.M.. 1992, The social basis of health and healing in Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Michel Foucault. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972/1977. (Ed) Colin Gordon. NY,Pantheon.

Good B. 1994, Medicine, Rationality, and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

Kleinman, A. 1995. Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press,

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