ATH 291 - Medicine & Culture

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR: Meets general academic requirement DE.
Prerequisite(s): ATH 112 Cultural Anthropology .
States of illness and health are not simply the result of biological processes. If we want to understand why people get sick and how they get better, we should also examine the social and cultural aspects of medicine and disease. This course is an introduction to medical anthropology: the study of cultural meanings, social relations, and systems of power that structure our experiences of illness and health. Students will engage with ethnographic texts and films from Western and non-Western medical settings in order to learn how health, illness, and healing practices are culturally shaped, transformed, and contested.