1ANTH/HSERV 475 Janelle Taylor Autumn 2009 Office: Denny M39University of Washington Phone: 543-4793Tue & Thu 10:30 – 12:20 Office hours: Thu 1:30 - 3:00Condon 139 jstaylor@u.washington.edu

Perspectives in Medical Anthropology

Course SyllabusAbout the Course

This course is an introduction to some aspects of the field of medicalanthropology. We shall focus especially on theoretical and methodological questions of how one approaches “illness,” “healing” or “medicine” as an object of ethnographicstudy. Though we shall read articles based on research carried out in many different partsof the world, many concern illness experience and medical practice in the United States.All of the scholars whose work we shall read examine illness, healing andmedicine in sociocultural and historical context. Most rely on ethnographic researchmethods, especially open-ended interviews and observation of social life over anextended time. Within this very broad consensus, however, there remain significantdifferences in the kinds of questions medical anthropologists ask, and the kinds of insights they achieve. The course is organized in a manner intended to highlight thesedifferences.We thus begin by reading work that focuses on “interpretive” medicalanthropology, in other words work which emphasizes questions of meaning, experienceand language. From there we move on to approaches that join attention to “interpretive”questions with a heightened concern for dynamics of power at work in the making of meanings around illness. We turn next to “critical medical anthropology,” meaning worksthat examine health, illness and medicine from the perspective of how they are bound upwith inequality and power – though, as we shall see, the researchers understand “power”in a range of different ways. We then consider some work that considers the biotechnologies upon which so much of contemporary medical practice depends, theglobal inequalities with which medicine is entangled, and the practices in which caringconsists.My goals for students in this course are: 1) to gain a working knowledge of theoretical issues in the field of medical anthropology; 2) to practice applying thisknowledge to specific topics; 3) to gain some understanding of current issues in US andworld medical systems; and more generally 4) to develop analytical skills that will helpus think critically about issues of health, illness, and medicine as we encounter them inour lives and in our world.Texts: One textbook has been ordered for this course at the University Book Store; it isExploring Medical Anthropology, 3

Edition, by Donald Joralemon. All other readingsare included in a course packet of photocopied articles has also been prepared specificallyfor this class, and will be available for purchase at Ave Copy on University Ave (near theintersection with 42

Street).

Class Schedule and Assignments

First Meeting

Oct 2 Introductions (no readings assigned)

Week 2: Opening New Perspectives Through Ethnographic Research

Oct 6Joralemon, chapters 1-2

Firsthand “description” account dueOct 8Lock, Margaret. 2002. “Medical Knowledge and Body Politics,” in

Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines

, ed. Jeremy MacClancy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 190-208.Kaufman, Sharon. 2005. “Appendix A: About the Research” and “Introduction,” in

…And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life

. New York:Scribner, pp. 327-332 and 1-20.

Week 3: Questions of Meaning, Experience, and Language

Oct 13Frank, Arthur. 2002. “Becoming Ill,” “Illness as Incident,” “Becoming Ill Again.” In

At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness

. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 8-28.Becker, Gay. 1994. “Metaphors in Disrupted Lives: Infertility and Cultural Constructionsof Continuity.”

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

8(4):383-410.Oct 15Aggegard Larsen, John. 2004. “Finding Meaning in First Episode Psychosis: Experience,Agency, and the Cultural Repertoire.”

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

18(4):447-471.Mattingly, Cheryl and Mary Lawlor. 2001. “The Fragility of Healing.”

Ethos

29(1):30-57.

Week 4: Narrative Struggles and “Noncompliance”

Oct 20Rouse, Carolyn. 2004. “ ‘If She’s a Vegetable, We’ll Be Her Garden”: Embodiment,Transcendence, and Citations of Competing Cultural Metaphors in the Case of aDying Child.”

American Ethnologist

31(4):514-529.Oct 22Hine. Janet. 2008. “Managing the Unmanageable: Elderly Russian Jewish Emigres andthe Biomedical Culture of Diabetes Care.”

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

22(1):1-26.Chapman, Rachel R. 2003. “Endangering Safe Motherhood in Mozambique: PrenatalCare as Pregnancy Risk.”

Social Science and Medicine

57:355-374.

Week 5: Workings of Power and Narrative in Epidemics

Oct 27Joralemon, chapters 3-5

Paper #1 dueOct 29Kroeger, Karen A. 2003 “AIDS rumors, imaginary enemies, and the body politic inIndonesia.”

American Ethnologist

30(2):243-257.Briggs, Charles. 2004. “Theorizing Modernity Conspiratorially: Science, Scale, and thePolitical Economy of Public Discourse in Explanations of a Cholera Epidemic”

American Ethnologist

31(2):164-187.

Week 6: Structural Violence, State Policies, and Embodied Consequences

Nov 3Farmer, Paul. 2005.“On Suffering and Structural Violence: Social and Economic Rightsin the Global Era,” in

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the NewWar on the Poor.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 29-50.Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. “Nervoso: Medicine, Sickness, and Human Needs,” in

Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

. Berkeley:University of California Press, pp. 167-215. Nov 5Horton, Sarah. 2004. “Different Subjects: The Health Care System’s Participation in theDifferential Construction of the Cultural Citizenship of Cuban Refugees andMexican Immigrants.”

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

18(4):472-489.Janes, Craig and Oyuntsetseg Chuluundorj. 2004. “Free Markets and Dead Mothers: TheSocial Ecology of Maternal Mortality in Post-Socialist Mongolia.”

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

18(2):230-257.

Week 7: Power/Knowledge in Biomedicine

Nov 10Joralemon, chapter 6Good, Byron. 1994. “How Medicine Constructs Its Objects,” in

Medicine, Rationality,and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective

. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, pp. 65-87. Nov 12Rhodes, Lorna. 1990. “The Game of Hot Shit,” in

Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit.

Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 55-80.Davenport, Beverly Ann. 2000. “Witnessing and the Medical Gaze: How MedicalStudents Learn to See at a Free Clinic for the Homeless.”

Medical AnthropologyQuarterly

14(3):310-327.

Week 8: Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies

Nov 17

Joralemon chapters 7-9