The Anthropology of Health Disparities

3 units

This course approaches the subjects of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class-related health disparity epidemiologically and anthropologically. Students in this course will explore these cultural categories both as factors that contribute to systematic differences in health status and outcomes and as dynamic frameworks through which those systematic differences can be examined and understood. The grounding assumptions of this course are 1) that race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class are cultural constructs employed by humans in an effort to account for observed physical, dispositional and behavioral group-level diversity; 2) that disparity, and particularly health disparity, is meaningfully associated with diversity but is not caused by it; and 3) that because humans are the product of two dynamic, complex systems (biology and culture), health disparities are most usefully engaged as conditions of process and interconnectedness.