Dr. H. Narasimhan

Optional on BA/BSc Social Anthropology and BA Anthropology and Law. Also available to General Course students and as an outside option.

This course looks at anthropological approaches to health and illness. We will begin with a focus on medical anthropology's development as a subfield, and chart this growth through various theoretical frameworks that have shaped research in the last few decades. Through ethnographic examples, the course will enable students to obtain an understanding of the debates and discussions within medical anthropology, and draw connections to the larger debates in anthropology itself. Topics covered will include maternal and child health policy in India, poverty and illness in Brazil, HIV/Aids in Haiti, new reproductive technologies in Egypt, and medical pluralism in a U.S. hospital.

The course will be taught by weekly one-hour lectures and classes in the Lent term. One class is held in the Summer Term.

Anthropology students taking this course will have the opportunity to submit a tutorial essay for this course to their academic tutors. For non-Anthropology students taking this course, a formative essay may be submitted to the course teacher.

Pool, R and Geissler, W. 2005. Medical Anthropology. Open University Press; Van Hollen, Cecilia. 2003. Birth on the threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India. University of California Press; Fadiman, Anne 1998 The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: a Hmong Child, her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures. Farrar Straus & Giroux Inc.; Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil . University of California Press; Farmer, Paul. 1993. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. University of California Press; Inhorn, Marcia. 2003. Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion and in Vitro Fertilization in Egypt. Routledge; Kleinman, Arthur. 1980. Patients and Healers in the context of culture. University of California Press; Nichter, Mark and Mimi Nichter. 2002. Anthropology and International Health: Asian Case Studies; Routledge; A. Castro and M. Singer. 2004. Unhealthy Health Policy: A critical anthropological examination. Altamira Press; A. Leibing and L. Cohen. 2006. Thinking about Dementia: Culture, Loss and the Anthropology of Senility. Rutgers University Press.

One two-hour examination in the Summer Term (80%) and a 2,000-2,500 word assessed essay due at the start of the Summer Term (20%).