This course is an introduction to the rapidly expanding subfield of medical anthropology.  It will teach you to analyze how social, cultural, political, and economic factors impact the body.  It will also show you how these factors shape the ways people understand, experience, and respond to states of health and disease.   In addition to exploring the medical systems of other cultures, we will also reflect on biomedicine as a cultural artifact. 

The course is organized around four sets of questions which have been central to the field of medical anthropology.  Exploring these questions will provide insights into problems which patients, medical practitioners, and other people face when confronting illness, disease, and other forms of suffering.

1)   How do patients experience states of health and illness?  How are these experiences shaped by social and cultural contexts? What happens when patients and practitioners have different understandings of an illness?  How might these sites of conflict be mediated in medical settings?

2)   How do people use the body and its afflictions as symbols to speak about and respond to the social worlds in which they find themselves?

3)   How do social, cultural, political, and economic factors shape the body?  How are bodies injured by violence that extends beyond direct physical force?  How might medical practitioners and others collaborate with or confront the unwitting perpetrators of such violence?’

4)   How do ideas, practices, and material artifacts of medicine shape our understandings of each other and ourselves as particular kinds of persons?  How do medical experiences influence various forms of belonging?