Courses

The course deals with practical issues of communication about health and healing in South Africa. It focuses on the Nguni language environment (Zulu/Xhosa/Swati/ Ndebele) but also addresses some issues relating to other South African languages. The course offers an introduction to Zulu language in the context of health, and to social and cultural issues surrounding the origins of suffering, the articulation of symptoms, and the role of the family, traditional healers, and Western medical practitioners. Particular attention is given to HIV/AIDS in the community and to the status and attitudes of young people.

This seminar will review theoretical positions and debates in the burgeoning fields of medical anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). We will begin this seminar by reading Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological as a starting point to explore how “disease” and “health” in the early 19-century became inseparable from political, economic, and technological imperatives. By highlighting the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine, the remainder of this seminar will then focus on major perspectives in, and responses to, critical studies of health and medicine, subjectivity and the body, psychiatric anthropology, global health, and humanitarianism and medicine.

An advanced seminar on the long tradition of social science scholarship on environmental perturbation and natural disasters, the relevance of which has been heightened by the current global attention to climate change. Topics covered include the academic literature on the social dimension of natural disasters, illustrated with a case study of volcanic hazard; the discursive dimensions of environmental degradation, focusing on deforestation and other case studies; climate change, including discursive dimensions at the global level; the current debate about the relationship between resource wealth and political conflict, focusing on the "green war" thesis, and the case of tropical forest commodities; and alternative perspectives on sustainable environmental relations, based on interdisciplinary work and work in the humanities. Three-hour lecture/seminar. Enrollment limited to twenty.

This interdisciplinary seminar, designed for graduate students in Anthropology and Global Health, explores in an in-depth fashion anthropological ethnographies on many of the serious health problems facing populations in resource-poor societies around the globe. The course focuses on three major issues: (1) poverty, structural violence, and health as a human right; (2) struggles with infectious disease; and (3) the health of women and children (and men, too). Within these three themes, many major issues of global health concern are addressed, including the health-demoting effects of poverty, racism, patriarchy, and inhumane conditions of life and labor in many countries; men's and women's sexuality in the era of HIV/AIDS; the politics of epidemic disease control and other disasters, and the role of communities, nation-states, and international organizations in responding to such crises; issues of coercion in population control and the quest for reproductive rights; and how child health is ultimately dependent on the health and well-being of mothers. The underlying purpose of the course is to develop students' awareness of the political, socioeconomic, ecological, and cultural complexity of most health problems in so-called developing nations and the consequent need for anthropological sensitivity, contextualization, and activist involvement in the field of global health. The course is also designed to expose students to salient health issues in many parts of the world from the United States to China. However, the primary focus is on global health issues facing sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.