mbpF2002

Medicine, Bodies, and Power
Sarah Lawrence College (ANTH-3177-R)
Fall 2002

Instructor: David Valentine             Class time: M/Th 11:05am - 12:30pm, Dudley Lawrence 04
Office: Sheffield 05                            Fall class dates: September 9 - December 19, 2002
Phone: 914.395.2363                            email: [email protected]

Course Description:
"Medicine, Bodies, and Power" seeks to understand and explain the relationships among illness, health, healing systems, the human body, bodily practices, and broader systems of social power. Taking an anthropological and cross-cultural perspective, the basic premise of the course is that an understanding of disease, health, the body, and embodied practices requires an understanding of the contexts of social power within which they are experienced, and the cultural meanings which make sense of them. The course aims to build from an understanding of how cultural ideas about health and the body, and the stratified nature of health care provision, shape people's experience, to an understanding that even physical experiences such as pain and suffering are also culturally mediated and politically located.

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.

We will focus on a range of practices and understandings about the body: from medical diagnoses to tattooing, from cultural understandings of body size to discourses about organ donation, and from the moral discourse of body appearances to the search for the biological "causes" of homosexuality. All of these topics, however, are united by a focus on the cultural organization of medical systems, understandings of the body, and bodily experience itself.

In the spring semester, we will focus in particular on how reproduction and sexuality become sites for medical intervention, and the ways that the internationalization of biomedicine produces complex results at the local level.

Speakers' Series
This course is organized alongside a speakers' series. Students are expected to attend three pubic talks at the college in the fall, and three in the spring. The schedule for this series will be available at the beginning of the semester, and attendance is compulsory. Please ensure that you organize your schedules accordingly.

Assigned Texts
Please note that as an "intermediate" course, the reading load for this class is relatively heavy, and you should consider the requirements and reading load carefully before you sign up for this class. A course reading packet is available at the library, and from me should you want to borrow it to make copies. As well as the reading packet, the following books will be needed, all of which are on reserve at the library and available for purchase in the bookstore:

1. Becker, Anne E. 1995 Body, Self and Society: the view from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
2. Lock, Margaret 2002   Twice dead : organ transplants and the reinvention of death. Berkeley: University of California Press.
3. Martin, Emily 1994 Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press.
4. Young, Katharine 1997 Presence in the flesh: the body in medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Policies and Requirements

Course and Conference Requirements
Class work for the semester will consist of the following formal projects:
1. Three 5-6 page papers, due in class on days noted in syllabus below.
2. Two mini-research projects, to be discussed in class.

Class work is due in class on the days noted in the syllabus below. I do not grant extensions other than for exceptional circumstances. If you believe you are embroiled in such a circumstance, I expect you to request an extension at least a day before the paper is due; DO NOT come to class without completed work unless I have granted you an extension. I am always willing to look at drafts of your work up until two days before the due date, which you may email me. I will not, however, accept emailed versions of your papers.

Conferences
I expect that you will complete the tasks we have agreed on for your conference work prior to your conference.

Policy on Lateness and Attendance
Please pay particular attention to the following: you are, naturally, expected to attend all classes and conferences associated with this class. It is expected that if you have to miss a class for a valid reason (such as illness or family emergency), you will inform me prior to the class, or as soon after as is possible. Since this is a seminar, your attendance and participation in class discussions is a central part of the course. I will take attendance in the first ten minutes of class. If you arrive late for class, you will not have the opportunity to sign the attendance sheet, and this will be noted as an absence. Please note the attendance policy: more than two unexcused absences will result in reduced credit for this course.

Course Outline

Part 1: Basic Terms and Concepts

1. Introduction to the Course (9/9/02)

2. The Political Body I (9/12/02)
Readings:
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.

Lock, Margaret
2001 The tempering of medical anthropology: troubling natural categories. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15(4):478-492.

3. The Political Body II (9/16/02)
Readings:
Baer, Hans, Merrill Singer and Ida Susser
1997 Medical anthropology and the world system: a critical perspective. Westport: Bergin and Garvey (Chapters 1, 2)

4. The Symoblic Body (9/19/02)
Readings:
Douglas, Mary
1992 [1966] Purity and Danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Routledge.
(Chapters 7, 9)

Part 2: The Body in (Bio)Medicine

5. The Body in Medicine I (9/23/02)
Readings:
Young, Katharine
1997 Presence in the flesh: the body in medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Introduction, chapters 1-2)

6. The Body in Medicine II (9/26/02)                      Film: Donka: X-ray of an African Hospital
Readings:
Young, Katharine
1997 Presence in the flesh: the body in medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(chapters 3-4)

7. The Body in Medicine III (9/30/02)
Readings:
Young, Katharine
1997 Presence in the flesh: the body in medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (conclusion and coda)

8. Narratives, Medicine, and the Body I (10/3/02)           **PAPER 1 DUE IN CLASS**
Readings:
Capps, Lisa and Elinor Ochs
1995 Out of Place: Narrative Insights into Agoraphobia. Discourse Processes (19): 407-439.

Ginsburg, Faye D.
1987 Procreation stories: reproduction, nurturance and procreation in life narratives of abortion activists. American Ethnologist 14(4):623-636.

9. Narratives, Medicine, and the Body II (10/7/02)          **PROJECT 1 DUE IN CLASS**
Readings:
Kaufman, Sharon R.
1997 Construction and practice of medical responsibility: dilemmas and narratives from geriatrics. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 21:1-16.

Dein, Simon
2002 The power of words: healing narratives among Lubavitcher Hasidim. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16(1):41-63.

Part 3: The Body in Bits

10. The Commodification of Body Parts (10/10/02)
Readings:
Sharp, Leslie
2001 Commodified kin: death, mourning, and competing claims on the bodies of organ donors in the United States. American Anthropologist 103(1):112-133.

Lock, Margaret
2002 Twice dead : organ transplants and the reinvention of death. Berkeley: University of California Press. (preamble - chapter 3)

11. Organ Transplants I (10/14/02)
Readings:
Lock, Margaret
2002 Twice dead : organ transplants and the reinvention of death. Berkeley: University of California Press. (chapters 4-7)

GUEST SPEAKER: Lesley Sharp (10/16/02)

12. Organ Transplants II (10/17/02)                     Film: A heart for Jo
Readings:
Lock, Margaret
2002 Twice dead : organ transplants and the reinvention of death. Berkeley: University of California Press. (chapters 8-11)

13. Organ Transplants III (10/21/02)
Readings:
Lock, Margaret
2002 Twice dead : organ transplants and the reinvention of death. Berkeley: University of California Press.   (chapters 12-14, reflections)

Part 4: The Very Together Body

14. Flexible Bodies I (10/24/02)              **PAPER 2 DUE IN CLASS (Option I)**
Readings:
Martin, Emily
1994 Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. (Parts 1-2)

15. Flexible Bodies II (10/28/02)
Readings:
Martin, Emily
1994 Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. (Part 3)

16. Flexible Bodies III (10/31/02)
Readings:
Martin, Emily
1994 Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. (Part 4)

17. Flexible Bodies IV (11/4/02)
Readings:
Martin, Emily
1994 Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. (Parts 5-6)

GUEST SPEAKER: Emily Martin (11/5/02)

Part 5: Illness and Healing in a Cross-Cultural Perspective

18. AIDS and HIV in a Cross Cultural Perspective I (11/7/02) **PAPER 2 DUE IN CLASS (Option II)**
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.

Leclerc-Madlala, Suzanne
1997 Infect one, infect all: Zulu youth response to the AIDS Epidemic in South Africa. Medical Anthropology 17:363-380

19. AIDS and HIV in a Cross Cultural Perspective II (11/11/02)
Readings:
Patton, Cindy
1992 From nation to family: containing "African AIDS." In Nationalisms and sexualities. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (eds.) pp. 218-234. New York: Routledge.

20. Illness and Healing in India (11/14/02)
Readings:
Nunley, Michael
1996 Why psychiatrists in India prescribe so many drugs. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 20:165-197.

Trawick, Margaret
1992 Death and nurturance in Indian systems of healing. In Paths to Asian medical knowledge. Charles Leslie and Allan Young (eds.) pp. 129-159. Berkeley: University of California Press.

21. Illness, Healing, and Religion (11/18/02)
Readings:
Schieffelin, Edward L.
1996 Evil spirit sickness, the Christian disease: the innovation of a new syndrome of mental derragement and redemption in Papua New Guinea. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 20:1-39.

Garrity, John F.
2000 Jesus, peyote, and the holy people: alcohol abuse and the ethos of power in Navajo healing. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(4):521-542.

22. (11/21/02) (AAA)
No Readings

23. (11/25/02)
Class round-table

11/28/02 -- Thanksgiving Break

Part 6: Hungry Bodies, Sated Bodies

24. You Are What You Eat...   (12/2/02)           **PAPER 3 DUE IN CLASS **
Readings:
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy
1992 Del�rio 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 and body size

25. The Cultural Location of Eating and Body Size I (12/5/02)
Readings:
Becker, Anne E.
1995 Body, Self and Society: the view from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (Introduction, chapters 1-2)

26. The Cultural Location of Eating and Body Size II (12/9/02)      **PROJECT 2 DUE IN CLASS**
Readings:
Becker, Anne E.
1995 Body, Self and Society: the view from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (chapters 3-4)

27. The Cultural Location of Eating and Body Size III (12/12/02)
Readings:
Becker, Anne E.
1995 Body, Self and Society: the view from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (chapters 5-6)

28. (12/16/02)
Presentation of conference projects

29. (12/19/02)
Course Review and organizational and planning meeting for spring semester.