MA Medical Anthropology and Mental Health

702 Ethnographic Research Methods takes research methods as philosophically and practically exciting techniques and attitudes that allow us to know and understand the world better. To know anthropological research methodology is better to understand the self, which is to better understand anthropological research methodology. The material addresses the history and foundations of anthropological knowledge, and describes some of the key concepts in anthropological methodology by using 'ethnographic writing' as a guide. The module encourages self-reflexivity, ethical conduct, and an anticipatory awareness of research practice and design.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? How might we understand the relationship between brain biology, adverse life experiences, and culturally experienced illness? How does social inequality, discrimination and abuse affect mental health? Is trauma a universally meaningful idea? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions.

This module deepens student understanding of key concepts in medical anthropology with a special focus on a) the materiality of bodies, substances, and practices, and b) science and technology studies that explore how knowledge comes into being, how it gains traction in the world, and how it shapes existing subjectivities and creates new ways of being and relating.

This module provides an introduction to the perspectives and practices of medical anthropology. It offers insights into the evolution of modern medicine and its key institutional, cultural, and ethical tenets as well as discourses and practices. The key aim is to engage in a cultural critique of biomedical assumptions, while also upholding a serious engagement with biomedical knowledge/mindsets in order to explore what they can offer anthropology. Notions of health and illness are shaped by social, cultural, political, and technological forces. Questions of health and illness are thus inextricably linked with questions of science, technology, modernity, power, religion, gender, colonialism, capitalism, and globalization. We will discuss key concepts such as the normal body, medicalization, social construction, subjectivity, and biopolitics; thus familiarizing students with scholarly and timely debates on how biotechnological developments have fundamentally transformed individuals and communities and the way they experience life and health. In other words, we ask how experience is shaped by systems of classification and intervention, and what epistemological and ethical issues arise from them.

This module guides students through key concepts and theories that have underpinned the discipline of social/cultural anthropology over the last five decades, with particular attention to how theoretical concerns and orientations are continually rethought and retooled to address contemporary conditions. The module consciously departs from the conventional “canon” (i.e., the “founding fathers” approach) to offer a more inclusive and vibrant picture of the discipline’s (post-1960s) theoretical shifts. But it does so without overlooking the reverberations of anthropology’s past colonial entanglements, and without giving up its older core question: what does it mean to be human? Weekly class sessions and readings address a variety of topics across the anthropological spectrum, without diluting their analytical and empirical richness.

A Dissertation of 10,000 words (excluding bibliography, appendices, etc., but including footnotes) is a required element of all MA Anthropology Degrees. The topic of the dissertation is left to students to decide according to their interests and subject to the agreement of the relevant Programme Convenor. The dissertation should show an appropriate command of anthropological theory and the relevant literature, as well as the capacity to apply this to the topic in question. Students should also demonstrate an understanding of the specialised field of their degree.

This module introduces students to ethnographic studies in and of a particular East Asian subregion, its resident populations, and its diasporas, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. With a particular focus on China and/or Japan, students will have the opportunity to explore classic and contemporary anthropological themes such as social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, food, and identity politics, as they take shape in particular locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any nation, subregion, or region, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This module introduces students to ethnographic studies in and of a particular region in Sub-Saharan Africa, its resident populations, and its diasporas, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. With a particular focus on West Africa, East Africa, or Southern Africa, students will have the opportunity to explore classic and contemporary anthropological themes such as social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, labour and livelihoods, violence and justice, and social identities, as they take shape in particular locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any nation, subregion, or region, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This module introduces students to ethnographic studies in and of the Near and Middle East, the region's resident populations, and its diasporas, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. The module draws on material on countries such as Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine, and may also include literature on Muslims in South East Asia and Europe. Students will have the opportunity to explore classic and contemporary anthropological themes such as social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, violence and justice, consumption, labour and livelihoods, and social identities, as they take shape in particular locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any nation, subregion, or region, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This course explores the construction and lived realities of race in its intersection with gender, and its rootedness in colonialism and empire, both historically and in the present. It critically situates anthropological knowledge as central to both the perpetuation and the critical analysis and political critique of race" as a category of difference with social, political, and economic effects. Exploring the fluid, socially constructed, and powerfully effective nature of both gender and "race" the course explores the ways they intertwine in theory and in lived experience across diverse societies and political discourses. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. Also exploring social theory and other scholarship beyond anthropology, the course examines the diverse and interconnected understandings, experiences, and effects of “race”and gender as systems of meaning-making and power across spaces, places and historical times. "

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This course will explore these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times. Different theories, approaches, and disciplinary angles will be introduced and discussed. We will also consider what de-colonising approaches to migration and diaspora might look like. By drawing on established and less charted bodies of work on migration studies, diaspora and identity, transnationalism, postcolonial and de-colonial studies the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the emergence of diasporas, the reformulation of 'home' and the simultaneous instability and reinforcement of nation-states.

Food and eating are fundamental to human life and health and play profound roles in the construction of social bodies, from families and kinship groups to religious groups and states. Further, food mediates our relationships with non-human beings and surroundings. In this module, we emphasise that our reliance on food for nutritional sustenance is inseperable from food's social, cultural and ecological dimensions. As such, the transformation of food habits and food systems are a central part of human experiences and world histories. We explore cultural diversities and historical change in food production and distribution, eating, cooking and sharing, recycling and wasting, and the classifying, celebrating and prohibiting of food and drink.