This course offers a comprehensive introduction to medical anthropology, focusing on how health, illness, and healing are shaped by cultural, social, and political factors. Students will explore a wide range of medical systems and practices, from biomedicine to ethnomedicine, examining how different societies understand the body, disease, and treatment. Through case studies and theoretical frameworks, the course highlights the impact of historical, economic, and political forces on global health and emphasizes the importance of cultural context in medical practices.

The course is structured around key themes such as the cultural construction of the body, the politics of global health interventions, medical pluralism, and the medicalization of life. Students will also engage in critical debates about biomedicine’s universalizing claims, health inequalities, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding global health interventions. In addition, the course addresses the role of gender, class, and power in shaping health experiences and outcomes.

Joralemon, Donald. Exploring Medical Anthropology. New York: Routledge, 2017. (Introduction)

Good, Byron J. "The Medical Imaginary and the Biotechnical Embrace." In Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, edited by João Biehl et al., University of California Press, 2007.

Kleinman, Arthur. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland Between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry. University of California Press, 1980. (Chapters 1 & 2)

Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Introduction and Chapter 3)

Lock, Margaret, and Vinh-Kim Nguyen. An Anthropology of Biomedicine. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. (Chapter 6)