Beliefs, Choices and Treatment; The Development of Medical Anthropology

Objectives of the course

The aim of this course is to acquaint students with the development and differentiation of medical anthropology as a distinctive field of social and cultural anthropology.

Prerequisites

Not required.

Assessment methods

Written examination.

Course contents

Although a number of medically qualified people were early contributers to social anthropology, the subject of medical anthropology did not emerge strongly or clearly either to social anthropology or to medicine until the 1960s and 1970s. Attention shifts from a number of critical issues about so-called primitive mentality and beliefs about causation to the social organisation of ritual and treatment, and from there to alternative systems of medical knowledge and practice in the context of pluralism with the rapid spread of elements of Western biomedicine. The subject now faces the challenge of a critical engagement with a great variety of medical contexts and of proving itself in application to specific and sometimes precise practical topics of choice and evaluation.

Recommended reading

Basic

• Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press (or the short version edited by Eva Gillies), 1937
• Farmer, Paul. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
• Good, B. J. Medicine, Rationality and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994
• Janzen, John. The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978
• Kleinman, Arthur. Social Origins of Distress and Disease. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986
• Kleinman, Arthur. Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995
• Leslie, Charles, ed. Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976
• Leslie, Charles and Allan Young, eds. Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
• Lindenbaum, Shirley and Margaret Lock, eds. Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993
• Littlewood, R. and M. Lipsedge. Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982
• Rivers, W. H. R. Medicine, Magic and Religion. London: Kegan Paul (recent edition), 1924

Supplementary

• Hsu, Elisabeth. The Transmission of Chinese Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999
• Sinclair, Simon. Making Doctors: An Institutional Apprenticeship. Oxford: Berg, 1997