Core courses

Anthropology of Health and Medicine
In this introduction to the anthropology of health and the body, you look at contemporary theories relating to ideas of wellbeing, to the politics and economics of health, to science, technology and modern medicine, to practices of healing, and to cultural perspectives on health and the body across the globe. The course will be divided into three broad sections, looking first at the body, then at political economies of health and social inequalities associated with health differences and healing practices, and finally at therapeutics, that is, idioms of healing and suffering (whether framed in terms of ‘science’ or ‘religion’). In the second half of term, you also look at particular topics such as applied work in the field of medical anthropology and the use of narratives in medical anthropology.

Anthropology of Health and Medicine 2: Research Focus
This course enables you to apply many of the themes of the introductory course to a specific topic of your own interest. It also enables you to conduct specialised reading and initiate independent research through supervision with the course convenor. The course aims to teach you to establish a clear, practical and theoretically grounded topic for investigation using secondary materials, formulate an interesting research question against the backdrop of general pertinent issues, and contextualise the focus within the field of medical anthropology.

Anthropological Theory
This course introduces students to the major subfields of modern anthropology in a historical and comparative framework, providing an historical grounding in the interplay between various overlapping theoretical orientations within modern anthropology.