Anthropology

This course explores the field of anthropology from the perspective of health systems in diverse sociocultural contexts (global North and global South, indigenous and non-indigenous societies, etc.). The first part of the course focuses on mental health, concepts of normalcy and pathology from a transcultural perspective, representations of madness, and the social and medical institutions that objectify them. The second part of the course examines the notion of the person, how the body is conceived of culturally and physically, how it ages and how it dies. The course also considers other topics such as feminist anthropological critiques of sexuality and gender, the anthropology of transmissible diseases, profound trauma, and questions of morality and culture in biomedicine and medical technology.

This course offers an introduction to the anthropological study of science and technology. We examine how science and technology come to matter in our daily lives. Rather than considering scientific facts and technical objects as products of human progress, independent of social and cultural contexts, we ask how specific facts and objects are produced (while not others) and how those facts and objects shape the ways we understand ourselves, live our lives, and relate to one another.

The course covers the intercultural issues presented in our personal and professional life, a necessary prerequisite if we want to become global citizens.

In this course, students focus on how bodily experiences shape sickness, disability, health, and wellbeing. The course also explores more general themes in anthropology by addressing how multisensory bodily experience shapes and is shaped by factors such as identity, gender, religion, kinship, the material world, and political economy.  This course introduces students to the "sensory turn" in anthropology and equip students with knowledge of relevant theories for studying the sensorial body, including concepts such as phenomenology, embodiment and perception. Students gain ethnographic knowledge regarding how people experience the world through multisensory bodily experience and the role this has in shaping cultural life in many contexts. Students explore the methodological skills needed to carry out ethnography that focuses on the sensorial body, and they have the space to put this knowledge into practice as students are required to design and conduct your own mini research project as the summative assessment. 

This course provides the tools to understand the intersection between religion, media, entertainment, and popular culture in the context of processes generally described as globalization. The course focuses on the formations of contemporary religious communities in various parts of the world, so as to highlight the differences between several religious traditions, the socio-political contexts in which they thrive, and the various means through which these religions are channeled to their audiences and adherents. The focus on media and popular culture includes anthropological understandings of religion, such as the effects that film, music, radio, and social media have in the shaping of power relations between groups of people.