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ANTH 499 Course website

Anthropology (ANTH) 499
Medical Anthropology (Revision 3)

Opened in Moodle, December 14, 2009.

View previous version.

Delivery mode: Individualized study online, individualized study with video component.* or Grouped study.
*Overseas students, please contact the University Library before registering in a course that has an audio/visual component.

Credits: 3 - Social Science.

Prerequisite: ANTH 275 and at least one 300 level social/cultural anthropology course OR ANTH 275 and a third year Health Science course OR permission of the course professor.

Centre: Centre for Work and Community Studies

ANTH 499 has a Challenge for Credit option.

Overview

ANTH 499 examines the notion that health and illness are not entities in themselves, but rather culturally constituted means of both representing and shaping human experience and reality. The course looks at different medical systems within particular cultural contexts. It also investigates several important themes including healers, medical pluralism, Indigenous medicine, the political economy of health and illness, the medicalization of social life, and the relationship between belief and the construction of clinical realities. The main theoretical approaches in medical anthropology are analyzed in the context of their strengths and weaknesses, which helps explain the ideologies and practices behind each system.

Outline

The course consists of the following eight units.

Unit 1: Introduction to Medical Anthropology

Unit 2: Theoretical Perspectives in Medical Anthropology

Unit 3: Biomedicine as a Cultural Category

Unit 4: Quantifying Health and Illness

Unit 5: The Social and Political Determinants of Health

Unit 6: Healers and their Patients in Ethnographic Context

Unit 7: Magic, Religion, and Healing

Unit 8: Cross-cultural Psychiatry

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Evaluation

To receive credit for ANTH 499, you must complete three telephone quizzes and four written assignments—two essays, a research paper proposal, and a final research paper and achieve an overall grade of “D” (50 percent) for the entire course. There are no examinations in this course. The weighting of composite grade is as follows:

Quiz 1
 Essay 1
 Quiz 2
 Essay 2
 Quiz 3
 Research Paper Proposal
 Final Research Paper
 Total
5% 20% 5% 20% 5% 5% 40% 100%

Course Materials

Textbooks

Farmer, Paul. 2005. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Payer, Lynn. 1996. Medicine and Culture: Varieties of Treatment in the United States, England, West Germany, and France. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Trostle, James A. 2005. Epidemiology and Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Young, David, Grant Ingram, and Lise Swartz. 2003. Cry of the Eagle: Encounters with a Cree Healer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Other materials

The course materials also include an Athabasca University-produced student manual, study guide, and a reader.

Special Course Features

Athabasca University Library has copies of the following videos that students are expected to view as part of this course.

Alamelu's Illness (video recording). Written and produced by Michael Yorke. Bristol: BBC, International Tele-Film, 1986.

Doctors Yang, Liou and Zheng (video recording). Written by Ted Kaptchuk and Michael Croucher. Produced by Michael Croucher. Bristol: BBC, International Tele-Film, 1986.

The Inner Journey (video recording). Written and produced by Michael Yorke. Bristol: BBC, International Tele-Film, 1986.

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