Health and illness might simply appear to be biological givens, and medicine might appear to be a study of those biological givens. However, but these are profoundly shaped by cultural, socio-economic and political processes. Medical anthropology examines these processes across different cultural and historical contexts. This course introduces students to fundamental themes, theories, concepts and debates in medical anthropology.
We will begin the course by thinking about how culture shapes healing systems, including biomedicine. We will pay attention to biomedicine as a particular knowledge system and critically examine how notions and norms of “normal” and “pathological” are constructed. We will focus on the process of medicalization and consider the different ways in which people become “medicalized”. We will consider social markers of difference such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability influence health and sickness. We will then explore new medical technologies such as organ transplantation, genetic testing, new reproductive technologies, as well as their sociopolitical and ethical implications. Within these discussions, we will be particularly attentive to the question of power both in its productive sense (e.g. the way medical technologies empower people) and its negative sense (e.g. the way social and political inequality result in illness and suffering).
- Teacher: Nilay Erten