Intro to Medical Anthropology

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course introduces students to the central concepts and methods of medical anthropology, the study of the social construction of illness and healing. Our primary focus will be Western biomedicine and the cultural and historical forces that shape both its institutions and the people and bodies interacting with those institutions. Throughout the course, we will attend to tensions and connections between peoples' lived experience and the structural conditions and systems of authoritative knowledge they face. We will begin with a puzzle - several cases illustrating what can go wrong when the perspective of the patient clashes with the perspective of the medical practitioner. Then, we will contextualize those cases by delving into the political, economic, linguistic, and social processes shaping local and global biomedical cultures - from the lab to the clinic - and how individuals and communities make sense of illness and healing.