Christine M Malcom

Adolescents feature prominently in culture stories and myths the world over, as well as in contemporary fantasy and science fiction. Anthropologically, adolescents are potentially powerful agents of change because they are imperfectly socialized and not yet tied to conservative adult roles. In this course we will examine the power and potential of adolescence through classic and contemporary anthropological works as well as the writing of authors including Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, and Garth Nix.

The scientific story of what a human is and how we ?became? human covers 6 million years of biological and cultural evolution. In this course, we look to the fossil record and living nonhuman primates to examine selective forces that influenced the human biological form as well as technology/culture as a factor that complicates the study of humans from a biological perspective. Topics include the origins of language, art, self expression, and spirituality.

In this course, we explore the phenomena of culture and society through a four-field anthropological lens. Topics include a brief history of anthropology as a social scientific discipline, an introduction to anthropological methods, the uniqueness of human culture from the perspective of arguments for nonhuman culture, the power and politics of language, and a comparative approach to universal cultural subsystems, explored through a wide variety of global case studies, as well as scholarship that turns the anthropological lens on the Western traditions in which the discipline originally developed.

In this course, we examine health and disease in cultural context. This requires challenging narrow Western views of health and the claim that biomedicine is objective and culture free. Topics include the overlapping, but non-identical, concepts of disease, illness, and sickness; the mind-body divide (or lack thereof); a historical overview of human health and cultural change; culture-specific medical practices, practitioners, and syncretism; population-specific health issues and health disparities; medicine under global, late-stage capitalism; and using anthropological knowledge to solve contemporary/emerging health problems. Readings vary but typically include historical works in the discipline by James Roney, George Foster, and Arthur Kleinman, as well as contemporary critical medical anthropology scholars, such as Paul Farmer, Marion Nestle, Marcia Inhorn, and Richard Sapolsky. We will approach these texts as a community, and each class meeting will foreground both small group and class-wide discussion grounded in readings. Students will complete weekly open-note quizzes and two open-note exams. In addition, students will give one presentation and complete three writing assignments.