AANK12040U Medical Antropology, advanced course; Medicine as Culture

Drugs, pharmaceuticals, and medicines at large play an ever increasing role in the everyday lives of people around the globe. From critical medicalization theory of the 1970s, over medical globalization theory in the 1980s and the 1990s, to contemporary  science and technology studies of biomedical technologies, it has become apparent that medicines are not autonomous entities, but that they are in different ways deeply enmeshed with medical, social, political and financial interests that have practical and moral consequences.

In this course we take the position that biological and social life is mutually constitutive and that it can therefore be both reasonable and fruitful to take medicines as a vantage point for studies in medical anthropology. The advent of large-scale treatment in rich countries of so-called life-style conditions, where people are being treated for often symptomless conditions such as elevated blood pressure, high levels of cholesterol and pre-diabetes, is only one prominent example of how medicines are redefining the landscape of health. Others could be the treatment of mental health conditions such as depression and different kinds of phobias.

In light of contemporary preventive health initiatives, classic social science theories about the patient role, the dys-appearing body, narrativity, and the therapeutic management group are being recast, because there is an absence of therapeutic events. People don't have to be ill to go on long-life treatment; they only have to be at risk. But what is the impact on people's identity? How do they perceive of their body? How are decisions made? Together with whom and based on what? And overall - how does such a development come about? These are some of the questions that we will be grappling with in this course.