STS 6331 - Anthropology of Biomedicine

Fall. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

R. Prentice.

In recent decades, anthropologists have begun to treat biomedicine as ethnomedicine, opening up the cultural assumptions, differences, and contingencies underpinning biomedical science and practice. This course examines biomedicine as a global cultural system, treating human health as a shifting product of nature and culture. Among topics covered will be approaches to illness and suffering, biomedical epistemologies, theories of embodiment, medicalization, and new medical technologies.