David Valentine Tu/Th 9:30-10:45am - Tisch LC4

September 7- December 12, 2000 Office Hours: Tuesday 11:15am-1:00pm

Phone: 998-8559 email: [email protected]

TA: Elise Andaya email: [email protected]

Course Description:

Medical anthropology seeks to understand and explain the relationships among culture, and illness, health, healing systems, and the human body. The basic premise of the course is that an understanding of disease, health, and the body requires an understanding of the cultural contexts in which they are experienced. The course aims to build from an understanding of how cultural ideas about health and the body shape people's experience, to an understanding that even physical experiences such as pain and suffering are also culturally mediated.

Though Western medicine focuses on the biological processes of illness and disease (both physical and mental), this course aims to show how all systems of healing and embodied experiences are culturally located. At the same time, the globalization of Western ideas (both medical and non-medical) also requires us to think about the ways that different cultural systems come up against one another in terms of approaches to disease, reproduction, sexuality, and bodily processes, issues which engage contemporary anthropological questions about power and meaning. In particular, we will look at how reproduction, sexuality, and the body become sites for medical intervention, and the ways that the internationalization of biomedicine produces complex results at the local level.

Course Requirements

Your grade will be assigned on the basis of the following formula: paper one (25%), midterm exam (25%), paper two (25%), final exam (25%). Alternatively, you may elect to do a research project in place of paper two and the final exam. Attendance at all lectures is a vital part of the course. Attendance will be taken, and will be considered in assigning your final grade.

Note on Films

The films shown in class are a part of the course, and should be considered as required texts. Exams and quizzes will cover the issues raised in the films.

Assigned Texts

The following books are required for the course and are available at the university bookstore.

Becker, Anne E.

1995 Body, Self and Society: the view from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press

Martin, Emily

1992 The woman in the body: a cultural analysis of reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press

In addition, assigned books and course readings are available at the Bobst reserve library. You can purchase a reading packet from New University Copy, 11 Waverly Place.

September 7:

Introduction to the course

September 12:

Readings:

Baer, Hans, Merrill Singer and Ida Susser

1997 Medical anthropology and the world system: a critical perspective. Westport: Bergin and Garvey (chapters 1 and 2)

September 14:

Readings:

Csordas, Thomas J. and Arthur Kleinman

1990 The therapeutic process. In Medical anthropology: a handbook of theory and method. Thomas M. Johnson and Carolyn F. Sargent (eds.) Pp. 11-25. New York: Greenwood Press.

Lock, Margaret and Nancy Scheper-Hughes

1990 A critical-interpretive approach in medical anthropology: rituals and routines of discipline and dissent. In Medical anthropology: a handbook of theory and method. Thomas M. Johnson and Carolyn F. Sargent (eds.) Pp. 47-72. New York: Greenwood Press.

September 19

Readings:

Baer, Hans, Merrill Singer and Ida Susser

1997 AIDS: a disease of the global system. In Medical anthropology and the world system: a critical perspective. Westport: Bergin and Garvey.

Lindenbaum, Shirley

1993 Knowledge and action in the shadow of AIDS In The time of AIDS: social analysis, theory and method. Gilbert Herdt and Shirley Lindenbaum (eds.) pp.319-332. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

September 21

Readings:

Singer, Merrill and Hans Baer

1995 AIDS and the health crisis of the US urban poor. In Critical medical anthropology. pp 203-234. Amityville: Baywood.

September 26

Readings:

Farmer, Paul

1992 New disorder, old dilemmas: AIDS and anthropology in Haiti. for the 1990s. In The time of AIDS: social analysis, theory and method. Gilbert Herdt and Shirley Lindenbaum (eds.) pp.287-318. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications

September 28

Readings: PAPER 1 DUE IN CLASS

Martin, Emily

1992 The woman in the body: a cultural analysis of reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press (chapters 1-3)

October 3

Readings:

Martin (chapter 4)

Lock, Margaret

1993 The politics of mid-life menopause: ideolgies for the second sex in North America and Japan. In Knowledge, power and practice: the anthropology of medicine and everyday life. Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock (eds.) pp. 330-363. Berkeley: University of California Press.

October 5

Readings:

Ginsburg, Faye and Rayna Rapp

1995 Introduction: Conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.

October 10

Readings: FILM: Something Like a War

Morsy, Soheir A.

1995 Deadly reproduction among Egyptian women: maternal mortality and the medicalization of population control. In Conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (eds). pp. 162-176. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pearce, Tola Olu

1995 Women's reproductive practices and biomedicine: cultural conflicts and transformations in Nigeria. In In Conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (eds). pp. 195-208. Berkeley: University of California Press.

October 12

Readings:

Jeffery, Roger and Patricia M. Jeffery

1993 Traditional birth attendants in rural north India: the social organization of childbearing. In Knowledge, power and practice: the anthropology of medicine and everyday life. Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock (eds.) pp. 7-31. Berkeley: University of California Press.

October 17

Readings:

Vance, Carole

1991 Anthropology rediscovers sexuality: a theoretical comment. Social Science & Medicine 33(8):875- 84

October 19

Readings:

Terry, Jennifer

1995 Anxious slippages between "us" and "them:" a brief history of the scientific search for homosexual bodies. in Deviant bodies: critical perspectives on difference in science and popular culture. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (eds). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

October 24

Readings: MIDTERM PAPER DUE IN CLASS

Irvine, Judith M.

1995 Regulated passions: the invention of inhibited sexual desire and sexual addiction . In Deviant bodies: critical perspectives on difference in science and popular culture. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (eds). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

October 26

Readings: FILM: Hermaphrodites Speak!

Daly, Mary

1990[1978] African genital mutilation: the uspeakable atrocities. In Gyn/Ecology: the metaethics of radical feminism. Boston: Beacon Press.

Walley, Christine

1997 Searching for "voices": feminism, anthropology, and the global debate over female genital operations. Cultural Anthropology 12(3):405-438.

October 31

Readings:

Chase, Cheryl

1998 Hermaphrodites with attitude: mapping the emergence of intersex political activism. GLQ 4(2):189-211.

November 2

Readings:

Becker, Anne E.

1995 Body, Self and Society: the view from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (Introduction, chapters 1-2)

November 7

Readings:

Becker (chapters 3-4)

November 9

Readings: FILM: Consuming Hunger

Finish Becker (chapter 5).

November 14

Readings:

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy

1992 Delírio de Fome: the madness of hunger. In Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Media Packet on eating disorders, fat, and cosmetic surgery

November 16

Readings: PAPER 3 DUE IN CLASS

Kleinman, Arthur and Joan Kleinman

1997 The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: cultural appropriations of suffering in our times. In Social suffering. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (eds.) Pp. 1-23. Berkeley: University of California Press.

November 21

Readings:

Mascia-Lees, Frances E. and Patricia Sharp

1992 Introduction: soft-tissue modification and the horror within. In Tattoo, torture, and adornment: the denaturualization of the body in culture and text. Albany: SUNY Press.

Asad, Talal

1997 On Torture, or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. In Social suffering. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (eds.) Pp. 285-308. Berkeley: University of California Press.

November 23 - Thanksgiving recess

November 28

Readings:

Scarry, Elaine

1985 Introduction. In The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world. London: Oxford University Press.

Good, Byron J.

1992 A body in pain: the making of a world of chronic pain. In Pain as human experience: an anthropological perspective. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good et al (eds). Pp.29-48. Berkeley: University of California Press.

November 30

Readings:

Jackson, Jean E.

1992 "After a while no one believes you": real and unreal pain. In Pain as human experience: an anthropological perspective. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good et al (eds). Pp.138-168. Berkeley: University of California Press.

December 5

Readings:

Conrad, Peter

1994 Wellness as virtue: morality and the pursuit of health. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 18:385-401.

December 7:

Course Review

December 12: FINAL EXAM DUE IN CLASS