ANTH532 - THEORY IN MED ANTH

This seminar explores anthropological perspectives on the interactions between biological and cultural systems. The goal of the seminar is to move beyond human experience as symbolic construction, and to understand how biology and pathology are expressed through and embedded in social relations and experience. We consider recent shifts in the sciences of human behavior, the vexed dynamic between objectivity and uncertainty, and the ways in which scientific knowledge informs moral categories and social thought. We will resist drawing premature conclusions about the pre-eminence of biological or cultural factors in the manifestation of identity or disease, and instead work to find an adequate language (and method of inquiry) to account for their interaction in specific bodies, populations, places, and times. Case studies will be drawn from Brazil, Vietnam, Ukraine, Uganda, Japan, the United States, China, and India.