Sociology and Anthropology 387, fall 1998

This course explores personal, bodily, and social dimensions of human suffering and well-being through cross-cultural ethnographic research. Using studies of chronic illness, gendered violence, witchcraft, and multiple personality and spirit possession, we will examine how experiences such as pain, madness, and ecstasy are produced and understood. We will compare the constitution of the body and the person in disparate healing practices, from biomedical analytics and Ayurvedic pharmacopeias to !Kung San summoning of "boiling energy." We will also consider the impact of systemic inequalities, social movements, and population sciences on health and illness worldwide, through studies of child survival, urban poverty, new reproductive orders, and international responses to AIDS and emerging infectious diseases.

Grades will be based on a midterm, a final paper, a final examination, class attendance, and class participation. Unexcused absences from class will result in a lower final grade. Students are expected to know and adhere to college policies on plagiarism, the honor code, and respect of library materials.

Coursepack readers 1 and 2.

Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung, by Richard Katz. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, by Shirley Lindenbaum. Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1979.

Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1992.

Child of the Dark, by Maria Carolina de Jesus. Mentor (Penguin Books), 1983.

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgois. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

(Introduction)

Wednesday 9/16 readings to be discussed:

"AIDS and the poetry of healing", by Rafael Campo, in In the Company of My Solitude, ed. Marie Howe and Michael Klein, pp. 20-32. Persea Books, 1995.

"Culture of terror, space of death", in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, by Michael Taussig, pp. 3-9. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Monday 9/21

"Experience and objective thought: the problem of the body", in Phenomenology of Perception, by M. Merleau-Ponty, trans. Colin Smith, pp. 67-72. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.

"The memory of the senses, Part I: marks of the transitory", by C. Nadia Seremetakis, in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, edited by C. Nadia Seremetakis. Boulder: Westview, 199x.

Wednesday 9/23

"Human beings: body, experience, and understanding", in The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power Among the Uduk of Sudan, by Wendy James, pp. 68-88.

Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung (first selection), by Richard Katz. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Pages 1-116.

Boiling Energy (second selection). Pages 117-end.

"The mindful body: a prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology", by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(1):6-41, March 1987.

"Expanding the sociology of the body", chapter 13, pp. 228-239 (especially pp. 234-238), in Medical Power and Social Knowledge, by Bryan S. Turner and Colin Samson. London: Sage, 1995.

"Introduction: approaches", pp. 3-13, in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, by Mircea Eliade. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. (optional)

"One finds oneself on the path already traveled and one foresees what remains to be done", "On the river Niger", "Children of the river"; in Genii of the River Niger, by Jean-Marie Gibbal, pp. 6-8, 9-17, 54-70.

Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, by Shirley Lindenbaum. Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1979. First selection: chapters 1-5, pp. 3-73.

Kuru Sorcery. Second selection: chapters 6-11, pp. 74-146.

"The female body and religious practice in the later Middle Ages", by Caroline Walker Bynum, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, volume 1, pp. 160-219. New York: Zone, 1989. (Especially pages 161-171, 176-188, 193-198)

"Religion and medicine: from sin to sickness", pp. 18-27 only, and "Women’s complaints: patriarchy and illness", pp. 84-99 and 106-109 only, in Medical Power and Social Knowledge, by Bryan S. Turner and Colin Samson. London: Sage, 1995.

"Nerves and emotional play in northeast Brazil", by L. A. Rebhun, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7(2):131-152, June 1993.

 *Friday 10/9: response paper on Kuru Sorcery (three pages) due 4 pm *

"Historical overview", pp. 23-44, in Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture, by Emily Martin. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

"The regulation of bodies", pp. 204-217, in Medical Power and Social Knowledge, by Turner and Samson.

"The biopolitics of postmodern bodies", by Donna Haraway, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 203-230. New York: Routledge, 1991.

4. Reproduction and social order: comparative approaches

Selections from Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 (first set). Fraser; O’Neil and Kaufert; Das; Kligman.

"On subjugated knowledges", pp. 80-85, in "Two lectures", in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, by Michel Foucault.

Selections from Conceiving the New World Order. "Introduction" (pages 1-3 and 13-15 only); Morsy "Deadly reproduction" (all); Browner and Press (especially pp. 307-310, 312-315, 320), Franklin "Postmodern procreation" (skip first section, start p. 326).

"The clinical gaze", "Technologies of the survey", "Disciplines of the survey: 1. child life and health", and "Subjective bodies", in Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth Century, by David Armstrong, pp. 1-6, 42-53, 54-63, and 101-112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

"Professions, knowledge and power", and "Medical bureaucracies: the hospital, the clinic and modern society", pp. 129-152 and 153-166, in Medical Power and Social Knowledge, by Turner and Samson.

"Artificiality and enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality" and "Severing the ties: fragmentation and dignity in late modernity", pp. 91-111 and 129-152, in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, by Paul Rabinow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

"On specific intellectuals and the character of truth in modern societies", pp. 125-132, in "Two lectures", in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, by Michel Foucault.

"Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals", by Carol Cohn. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12(4):687-718, 1987.

"Bodies and machines", in Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, by Hugh Gusterson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 101-130.

"From secrets of life to secrets of death", in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death, by Evelyn Fox Keller. New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 39-55.

"Preface", "Introduction: the savors of the soil", and "The jungle and the water's edge", in The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine, by Francis Zimmermann, pp. vii-x, 1-9, and 10-36. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. (You may choose to skim or skip pp. 10-27)

"Theory and practice of Chinese medicine", by Dan Vercammen, in Oriental Medicine: An Illustrated Guide to the Asian Arts of Healing, pp. 154-195, edited by Jan Van Alphen and Anthony Aris. Boston: Shambhala, 1996. (You may choose to skim or skip pp. 159-162, which describe textual classics of Chinese medicine.)

Optional: "Upanisad of the embryo" [Vedic text, ca. 6th century BC], in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, volume 3, edited by Michel Feher, pp. 176-179. New York: Zone Books, 1989.

"On being sick", pp. 37-54, in Medical Power and Social Knowledge, by Turner and Samson.

"Patients, physicians and context: medical care in the home", by Andrea Sankar, in Biomedicine Examined, M. Lock and D. Gordon, editors, pp. 155-178 . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988.

A Fortunate Man, by John Berger and Jean Mohr. London: The Penguin Press, 1968 (selection).

"AIDS and its metaphors" (partial selection), in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, by Susan Sontag, pp. 93-125. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1989.

"A nation at risk: interpretations of school refusal in Japan", by Margaret Lock, in Biomedicine Examined, M. Lock and D. Gordon, editors, pp. 377-414. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988.

"Babyhood: the social construction of infant care as a medical problem in England in the years around 1900", by Peter W. G. Wright, in Biomedicine Examined, M. Lock and D. Gordon, editors, pp. 299-307 and 323-324. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988.

"Drink boiled cooled water: a cultural analysis of a health education message", by Mark Nichter, in Anthropology and International Health: Asian Case Studies, by Mark Nichter and Mimi Nichter, pp. 393-400. Australia and other locations: Gordon and Breach, 1996.

"Wasted lives: tuberculosis and other health risks of being Haitian in a U.S. detention camp", by Steven Nachman. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 7(3), September 1993, 227-259.

"Filth and the magic of modern", in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, by Michael Taussig, pp. 274-283. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Introduction; selections from chapters 1-3; chapters 4 and 5.

Child of the Dark, by Maria Carolina de Jesus. Mentor (Penguin Books), 1983.

Death Without Weeping, chapters 6-9 (especially ch 6: 216-46, 259-67; ch 7: 268-276, 279-86, 303-316, also 316-339; ch 8: 340-343, 353-378, 381-385, 393-399; ch 9: 400-412, 426-433).

Selections from "Thirdworldization", "Nature and Homo sapiens", and "Searching for solutions", in The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, by Laurie Garrett (pp. 471-498, 507-509, 550-551, 590-591, 598-603, 606-620). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

"Some reflections on the emergence of AIDS in equatorial Africa", by David Eaton (n.d.).

"Introduction", and "Conclusion: AIDS and an anthropology of suffering", in AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, by Paul Farmer, pp. 1-16 and 252-264. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

"AIDS, HIV, and the social construction of reality", by Paula Treichler, in The Time of AIDS, Lindenbaum and Herdt, editors, pp. 65-99. Newbury Park: Sage, 1992.

"Seize control of the FDA", and "Sell Wellcome, free AZT", pp. 76-84 and 114-121, in AIDS Demographics, by Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston.

"AIDS in blackface", by Harlan Dalton. Daedalus: Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 118(3):205-228, Summer 1989.

"Is the rectum a grave?" by Leo Bersani. October 43:197-222. Reprinted in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.

"Beauty NOW", in Ground Zero, by Andrew Holleran. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988, pp. 131-143. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988.

"A synergism of plagues: 'planned shrinkage', contagious housing destruction, and AIDS in the Bronx", by Rodrick Wallace. Environmental Research 47:1-33, 1988.

"The medicalization of homelessness and the theater of repression", by Arline Mathieu, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7(2):170-184, June 1993.

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgois. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (Introduction, chapters 1-4).

In Search of Respect (chapters 5 and 7, and Conclusion).