ANTH 331: Advanced Topics in Medical Anthropology (BMC)

Alternative medicine is not a fashionable new trend but an established cultural strategy, as well as a dynamic feature of mainstream contemporary medicine, in which elements of folk traditions are often blended with western scientific approaches. The Anthropology of Alternative Medicineis a concise yet wide-ranging exploration of non-biomedical healing.

The Anthropology of Health and Healing provides a holistic approach to the study of medical anthropology. Anthropologists have researched topics related to medical anthropology for over 100 years, here Womack thoroughly surveys this richly diverse field and provides an integrated approach that links together the biological, psychological, social, communicative, epidemiological, philosophical, historical, and developmental factors that shape health and healing.

This edited collection explores the multiple ways in which ethnography and health emerge and take form through the research process. Ethnography and health are entangled in new and different ways, providing a timely opportunity to explore what these entanglements do and affect in the social production of knowledge. Rather than discussing the strengths (and limitations) of ethnography for engaging with health, the book asks: what does ethnography enable, make visible and possible for knowing and doing health in contemporary research settings and beyond?

When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery.

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor.

How do rapid social and technological changes shape reproductive realms today? What is at stake? What problems are raised? What solutions are offered? In this collection, leading international scholars consider the complex 'choices', anxieties, and challenges of reproduction in postmodernity for both women and men in a range of cultural positions and geographical locations in the West.