Anthropology 216MB - Special Topics in Anthropology: 'The Medical Body'

How has medical anthropology apprehended bodies through its decades-long history? In this course we will answer this question by nesting larger anthropological understandings of the body within central concepts in medical anthropology. We will begin the course by exploring the history of medical anthropology from the mid-20th century to the present. The second part of the course will be devoted to a few key topics in medical anthropological scholarship: caregiving labor, access to healthcare, bioethics, biopolitics, and structural violence. We will then turn to a series of discussions on key topics of interest to contemporary medical anthropologists in the third part of the course. Taken together, this course will shed light on the porosity and multiplicity of embodied states.

Prereq: ANTHR-105.