Folklore and Folklife - Courses - Fall 2004 - FOLK 369 401 Folk & Alternative Meds

For more information about Folklore and Folklife,at UPenn, contact Professor Dan Ben-Amos at dbamos@sas.upenn.edu.

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FOLK 369 401 Folk & Alternative Meds

E. MacKenzie
Cross-list with HSOC 369, HSSC 369
Distribution I: Society
Contact: emackenz@mail.med.upenn.edu

This course investigates the folk and popular health belief systems now known in the United States as Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), using an ethnographic approach to come to an understanding of a variety of healing systems. We will explore the many ways in which people explain how and why they get sick, how they decide what to do about it, and how all of this relates to larger frameworks of beliefs and values. We will compare these systems with each other, and with the conventional biomedical system, to better understand the range of constructions of health, illness, and care they represent. Guest lectures by practitioners and participants in non-conventional healing systems will provide us with insider views of some of the systems we study.

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