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Opened in Moodle, June 11, 2008
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.
Course website
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.
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
To receive credit for ANTH 499, you must complete five written assignments-two short essays, two longer essays, and a research paper assignment and achieve an overall grade of “D” (50 percent) for the entire course. The weighting of the composite grade is as follows:
Assign 1 | Assign 2 | Assign 3 | Assign 4 | Assign 5 | Total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
10% | 10% | 20% | 20% | 40% | 100% |
To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University's online Calendar.
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.
The course materials also include an Athabasca University-produced student manual, study guide, and a reader.
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.