ANTH 268 - Culture, Health and Illness: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology

3 Credit(s)

Disease and illness pose challenges to all human populations, yet the way people define and confront these challenges varies widely from culture to culture. That’s because health, illness, and healing are shaped not only by biological characteristics, but also by social dynamics, cultural values, and collective expectations. This course introduces students to the field of medical anthropology—the study of human health, disease, and curing from a holistic, cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on the fields of ethnography, physical anthropology, historical archaeology, and evolutionary biology, students examine various theories, methods, and frameworks in order to explore how health, illness, and healing are conceptualized and experienced in different cultures, with a particular emphasis on non-Western societies. The culturally constructed nature of Western biomedicine is examined alongside other forms of ethnomedicine and traditional folk healing. Topics include shamanism, ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, cultural and political ecologies of disease, global public health issues, community-based healthcare approaches, the role of epidemics in the evolution of human civilization, sociocultural definitions of mental illness, and issues surrounding unequal access to healthcare among various minority and subaltern groups.