Anthropology 205 A: Introduction to Medical Anthropology
Vincanne Adams Adeola Oni-Orisan
vincanne.adams@ ucsf.edu
[email protected] Thinking Through Theory in Medical Anthropology
This seminar introduces students to medical anthropology by way of a questioning of its
thematic and ethnographic "boundaries" traced theoretically and methodologically. It is
intended to complement 240 A-B and is a required course for medical anthropology
graduate students. The organization of materials enables us to work through development
of key theoretical frameworks that have been used in Medical Anthropology by tracing
the intellectual genealogies and analytics of contemporary ethnographies. The intention is
to think through theory in the discipline as a matter of both redefining its boundaries and
observing how successful these boundaries are at capturing the lived experience and
structured possibilities of suffering, disease and healing, building upon previous efforts.
We aim to ignite inspiration as well as rigor in our reading of the materials, and creativity
in their wake. Although some students will be familiar with some of these materials, this
course aims to invigorate critical analysis at the graduate level.
Evaluation
Grading is based on a final paper and on seminar participation. The latter includes
individual leadership of discussions and submission of a weekly précis--a short (no more
than 1-2 pages) summary and discussion of readings focusing on (1) the primary
argument in relation to intellectual genealogies, (2) the evidentiary basis of analysis, and
(3) a critique. Precis should be emailed to the instructors and classmates no later than the
evening two days before the seminar. Participants will rotate responsibilities for leading
the discussions each week.
The final paper should each be a critical review and comparative analysis of a theme or
problem covered in the course and explored more thoroughly. Papers should be no more
than 15 pages, double spaced. Papers are due on the final meeting of the seminar.
9/28 Week One:
Biomedicine and The Problem of Knowledge
Ruha Benjamin 2019 Race After Technology New York: Polity Press.
Deborah Gordon 1988 “Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine” In Lock and
Gordon, eds. Biomedicine Examined Springer, pp. 19-56.
Donna Haraway 1988 “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective” Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575-599.
10/5 Week Two:
Development and the Postcolonial
Julie Livingston 2019 Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from South
Africa Durham: Duke University Press.
Crystal Biruk 2014 “Aid for gays.” Journal of Modern African Studies. 52(3): 447-473.
Frantz Fanon 1965 “Medicine and colonialism.” In A Dying Colonialism, trans. By
Haakon Chevalier, New York: Grove Press, pp.121-45.
10/12 Week Three:
Gender and Politics of Reproduction
Khiara M. Bridges 2011 Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a site of
Racialization Berkeley: University of California Press.
Craig R. Janes and Oyuntsetseg Chuluundorj 2004 “Free Markets and Dead Mothers:
The Social Ecology of Maternal Mortality in Post-Socialist Mongolia.” Medical
Anthropology Quarterly, 18(2): 230-257.
10/19 Week Four:
Race and The Social Production of Disease
Michael Montoya 2011 Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science and the Genetics
of Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clarence Gravlee 2009 “How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social
Inequality.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139(1): 47-57.
Sonia Mendoza, Allyssa S. Rivera & Helena Hansen, 2019 “Re-racialization of
Addiction and the Redistribution of Blame in the White Opioid Epidemic.” Medical
anthropology quarterly, 33(2), 242-262.
10/26 Week Five:
Human Rights, Affect Theory, Innocence
Kamari Clark 2019 Affective Justice (selected chapter) Durham: Duke University Press.
Lauren Berlant 2011 Cruel Optimism (selected chapter) Durham: Duke University
Press.
Miriam Ticktin 2017 “A World Without Innocence” American Ethnologist, 44 (4): 577-
590.
Deborah Thomas 2011 “Deviant Bodies: 2005/1945.” In Exceptional Violence:
Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham: Duke University Press, pp.
53-86.
11/2 Week Six:
Discipline, Violence and Abolition
Elizabeth Povinelli. 2019. DrivingAcross Settler Late Liberalism: Indigenous Ghettos,
Slums and Camps, Ethnos, 84(1): 113-123.
Savannah Shange 2019 “Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality and the refusal of
Ethnography” Transforming Anthropology, 27(1): 3–21.
Jared Sexton 2011 The social life of social death: On Afro-pessimism and Black
optimism. In Tensions, 5: 1–47.
11/9 Week Seven:
Environment, Exposure, Harm
Elizabeth Hoover 2016. “’We’re not going to be guinea pigs:’ Citizen Science and
Environmental Health in a Native American Community” Journal of Science
Communication, 15(1), A05.
Nick Shapiro 2015 “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily
Reasoning and the Chemical Sublime” Cultural Anthropology 30(3): 368-93.
Michelle Murphy 2019 “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” Cultural
Anthropology, 32(4):494-503
11/16 Week Eight:
Ontology Ethnography and the Anthropocene
Juno Parrenas 2018 Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan
Rehabilitation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa Matters of Care. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press (selected chapter).
11/23 Week Nine:
Disability and Embodiment
Sunaura Taylor 2017 Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation New York:
the New Press. Prologue and Part One. pp. 1-43.
Jasbir Puar 2015 “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled”
Social Text, 124 33(3):45-73.
Geyla Frank 1986. “On Embodiment: A Case Study of Congenital Limb Deficiency in
American Culture.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 10(3):189-219.
11/30 Week Ten:
Revisiting the Ethnographic Form
Ryan Cecil Jobson 2020 “The case for Letting Anthropology Burn” American
Anthropologist, 122(2):259-271.
Jonathan Metzl 2010 “Introduction: Why Against Health?” In Metzl and Kirkland, eds.
Against Health: How health became the new morality. New York: New York University
Press, pp.1-14.
Audre Lorde 2017 [1988]. “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer.” In A Burst of Light:
Other Essays New York: Ixia Press, pp. 40-78.
