The course aims to highlight the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of the body, health, illness and care systems (including biomedicine), with particular reference to geopolitical arrangements and socioeconomic inequalities that affect the health of different populations across the planet.
Prerequisiti
Students are expected to have preliminary knowledge of the current political, social and economic situation of countries in the Global North and Global South, of the historical processes that shaped it, and of the postcolonial transformations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students should also have basic geographical skills and a general understanding of the history of social and cultural anthropology, including its main theoretical models and the methodological tools of ethnography.
Metodi didattici
In addition to lectures, students will be provided with teaching materials such as slides, supplementary articles, video and photographic materials, and concept maps.
Verifica Apprendimento
Oral Exam
Testi
1- An introductory textbook in medical anthropology presenting the main theoretical and methodological currents and situating them within both a historical and a thematic-conceptual trajectory. Recommended text: Merrill Singer, Hans A. Baer, Debbi Long, and Alex Pavlotski, 2025, 4th ed., Introducing Health Anthropology: A Discipline in Action, Bloomsbury. 2- One of the volumes from the following list, chosen by the student. - Arthur Kleinman, 1995, Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine, University of California Press. - Margaret Lock, 2001, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, University of California Press. - Paul Farmer, 2003, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, University of California Press. - Didier Fassin, 2011, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, University of California Press. - Adriana Petryna, 2013, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Princeton University Press. - Veena Das, 2015, Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty, Fordham University Press.
Contenuti
First part: introduction to medical anthropology through the history of the discipline and its main theoretical and methodological orientations. The classical concepts of illness, sickness and disease will be critically examined, together with theoretical frameworks such as Kleinman’s explanatory models, the narrative perspective on health and illness, the embodiment paradigm, and the concept of social suffering developed by critical medical anthropology. Second part: thematic study of selected ethnographic works by anthropologists who have explored how sociocultural context, symbolic frameworks, and complex social and political inequalities influence, at both local and global levels, the experience of health and illness among different human populations and in intersection with various forms of belonging, including gender, class, ethnicity and nation.
