'Magic Medicine': An Anthropological Approach to the Study of Religion and Medicine

3 units

This class is a comparative survey of religion, magic, and witchcraft as they are related to concepts of the body, health, healing and death across cultures. As such, students in this class will be expected to simultaneously learn details from particular magical and healing traditions studied in class, as well as to relate these details to theories about within the discipline of Anthropology (medical, cultural, psychological) and the field of Religious Studies. Special themes addressed in the class are the reasonableness of belief in magic, religion and religious practice as magical, the body and definitions of health, healing, and illness and disease as symbolically, culturally, even magically constructed and experienced.