ANTH 211 Health and Illness in CrossCultural Context

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ANTH 211Health and Illness in Cross-Cultural
Context

• Introduction

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Basic Information

• Instructor Clare Fawcett
• Office  Bruce Brown 335H
• Tel [phone]
• E-mail cfawcett_at_stfx.ca

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Course goals

• To learn about how people define, experience and
  maintain health in cultures around to world.
• To learn about how people define, prevent and
  treat in cultures around the world.
• To examine a variety of theoretical frameworks
  used by anthropologists to analyse health and
  illness.
• To develop skills in reading and writing academic
  texts and in oral presentation.

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Course outline

• http//people.stfx.ca/cfawcett/ANTH211/Anth20211
  202008-09/Anth2021120Outline202008-09.htm

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Anthropology

• Four fields
• Holistic
• Comparative
• Ethnography and ethnology

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Culture

• Being human having culture
• Learned not innate
• Environment, technology, social organization,
  ideology
• Culture as bounded and static
• Culture as porous and fluid
• How is culture determined? How does culture
  change?

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Theoretical frameworks and debates

• Biological determinism versus cultural
  construction
• Agency versus structure
• Materialist explanation versus Idealist
  explanation

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Janzens definition of medical anthropology

• Medical anthropology is the study of health,
• illness and healing across the range of
• human societies and over the course of
• human experience, with an emphasis on
• how members of the community direct their
• behaviors, articulate their ideas, and
• organize their resources in these realms.
• (Janzen, p. 2)

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Key topics in medical anthropology

• Patterns of disease in an environment
• Response to disease
• Maintenance and restoration of health
• Meaning of illness and suffering

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How do we define health?

• Absence of diseasebiological definition
• Adaptation of an organism to a particular
  environmentecological definition
• Social, political, economic and spiritual
  well-beingsocial, structural or subjective
  definition

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How do we define sickness and suffering?

• sickness is the individual or group experience
  of suffering, from the onset of a condition to
  the outcome
• These are subjective
• Examples?

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Disease versus illness

• Disease is objective
• Illness is a subjective experience
• Disease can exist without illness and illness can
  exist without disease
• Examples?

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Healing

• Resolution of disease or illness
• Examples?

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Janzens examples of medical anthropological
research

• KuruCreutzfeldt-Jacobholistic and political
  understandings of disease and illness
• Birthingbiocultural
• Asian medicinemedical traditions and medical
  pluralism

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Medical anthropological research

• Academic
• Applied
• Activist