ANTH 321(F) Visualizing Health and Illness: Medical Ways of Knowing
As patients, practitioners, kinfolk, sufferers and caretakers, we learn to see signs of life, death, illness and healing in the self and others. Culture, technology, and the social norms through which we ascribe wellness shape how, when, and where we see and interpret the body as in a state of health or illness. This class explores the visual culture of medicine and the techniques through which we learn to see and be seen medically. Sight is but one sense through which health and illness are perceived. Our analysis will consider the relationship of vision to other perceptual modes: how do we smell, feel, taste, and hear health? Good's Medicine, Rationality and Experience, Foucault's Birth of the Clinic, and Crary's Techniques of the Observer will serve as theoretical frameworks through which to understand the role of sight, seeing, and visual technology in anthropological monographs and film on life, health, and illness. Case studies include but are not limited to the arrangement of the Victorian sickroom; death and dying among the Yolmo of Nepal; brain scan technology and its relationship to personhood; the iconography of madness, depression and mania; the establishing of visual regimes that perceive difference across gender and race; and fetal imaging and its shifting nature over time.
Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: participation, student presentations, one 7- to 8-page paper, a take-home essay midterm, 15- to 20-page final research paper.
No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 30 (expected: 20). Open to all classes, but preference given to Anthropology and Sociology Majors.
Hour: MULLA