ANTH 226   Critical Global Health

In contemporary American society, Western medicine-or biomedicine-is seen as offering quick, effective, and technologically advanced solutions to pain and suffering. Biomedicine is a medical system that privileges the physiological and biological causes of disease. As a clinical science, biomedicine is usually seen as culture-less, as universally effective on all bodies. But what happens when Western medicine goes "global," that is, when it encounters cultural values or beliefs that conceptualize illness, healing, or the body in different ways? Is medicine itself "cultural," and if so, how? This course examines how people experience, use, and critique global health interventions across the globe, and why sociological and anthropological approaches to global health are critical to improving these interventions.