Medicine, Culture, and Society

Undergraduate / Graduate

Medical anthropology is the study of human health and illness across culture, time, and location. This course will introduce and explore some of the aspects of medical anthropology. We will approach medical systems as cultural systems and discuss health, well-being, illness, and disease as ethnographic questions. This is a reading intensive, discussion-based course. All of the scholars we will read in this class use anthropological tools and methods to explore various conditions in their specific sociocultural and historical contexts. After this course, students will have a working knowledge about the scope of the field of medical anthropology. What is so cultural about disease? How does culture shape illness experience and narrative? What is the significance of language talking about health? How are power and violence defined in the context of health and illness? How is medicine related to culture? This course is designed to help us develop critical thinking about the issues of health and medicine and the ways in which they are related to culture and society.