ANTH 227 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-5: Medical Anthropology, Biomedicine, Biopower

• School: McGill University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 227
• Professor: Sandra Teresa Hyde

Document Summary

Module one = proto-medical anthropology: history and scope. We begin this course with proto-medical anthropology, the rationality debate, and just what knowledge in magic and sorcery means. Lectures will cover the early work in medical anthropology on medical systems as functional, adaptive systems of knowledge and practice, and then move to case studies, including a guest lecture on complementary and alternative medicine here in montr al. We will begin this module by discussing illness and misfortune among hmong immigrants in the. United states in order to see what happens when different medical explanatory models and practices clash. The purpose is to understand how biomedicine is a powerful cultural belief system that is global in its scope, creates disease categories, and produces authoritative knowledge. We will then move on to medical pluralism and take china as our case study for understanding the integration of. Module three = the normal and the abnormal.