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
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:
| Activity | Weight |
| Quiz 1 | 5% |
| Essay 1 | 20% |
| Quiz 2 | 5% |
| Essay 2 | 20% |
| Quiz 3 | 5% |
| Research Paper Proposal | 5% |
| Final Research Paper | 40% |
| Total | 100% |
To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University’s online Calendar.
Materials
Physical course materials
The following course materials are included in a course package that will be shipped to your home prior to your course’s start date:
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
Student Manual (digital)
Study Guide (digital)
Course Readings (digital files linked to each unit in the study guide)