HEALTH AND ILLNESS ANTHROPOLOGY

The course is addressed to students of the MA programme in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnolinguistics (ACEL) and is optional for all curricula.
Students enrolled in other programmes are required to write to the lecturer for a preliminary assessment of their general competence in Cultural Anthropology and the identification of an appropriate programme.

The course aims at promoting the following skills: reading of scientific texts, synthesis of complex concepts and themes, critique, and oral expression.
At the end of the course, students are able to think in complex terms the relationship between subject, body and society and are aware of the main themes of scientific debate, as well as the main theories and research fields. In addition, they manage the basic conceptual tools that allow them to explore, with a critical attitude, such themes in specific areas of intervention, through both research and applied research, carried out in settings where therapies and other forms of intervention are implemented.

Although no particular prerequisites are required, it is advisable that students possess a basic knowledge of the main theoretical approaches and research methods characterising Social and Cultural Anthropology.
Students enrolled in other programmes are required to write to the lecturer for the assessment of their general competence in Cultural Anthropology and the identification of an appropriate programme.

The human experience is intrinsically characterized by a dimension that is bodily and a relational at once: the body ‘emerges’ as matter and form of existence on account of its relations with the physical and human environment. It is for this reason that anthropology cannot fail to question the mutually constitutive relationship between body and society. The Anthropology of Health explores this relationship in many of its forms, approaching the ways in which the body is at the same time lived, expressed and affirmed, but also constantly constructed and reconstructed socially. As such, the body becomes ill and is cared for ‘socially’, in as much as illness is the embodied result of specific social relationships and therapy is the mobilization of collective resources to explain and treat suffering (and the collective risk it entails). Explanations and treatments, in turn, are representative of dominant values and institutional relations that are hegemonic within a context, but also of the various attempts to affirm new forms of relationship and alternative models of the person and society.
The course will examine these connections, illustrating the main theories in the anthropology of health, body, suffering and disease, but also exploring some specific fields in which the relationship between subject, body and society is dynamically constructed (and can therefore be analyzed). In particular, the course aims to cover the following topics: a) traditional healing practices; b) global epidemics; c) psychiatry; d) migration and ethnopsychiatry; e) drugs and other therapeutic objects; f) aesthetic treatments and body performance; g) assisted reproduction.

PROGRAMME FOR ATTENDING STUDENTS
1) Compulsory reading: Pizza, Giovanni, Antropologia medica. Saperi, pratiche e politiche del corpo, Carocci 2005.
2) Articles, book chapters and other texts that will be made available in Moodle.

PROGRAMME FOR NON-ATTENDING STUDENTS
1) Compulsory reading: Pizza, Giovanni, Antropologia medica. Saperi, pratiche e politiche del corpo, Carocci 2005.
2) Articles, book chapters and other texts that will be made available in Moodle.
3) A monograph to be selected among the following works:

a) Traditional healing practices:
De Martino, Ernesto, La terra del rimorso. Contributo a una storia religiosa del sud, Il Saggiatore, 1961 (ediz. 2015 disponibile)
Fassin, Didier, Pouvoir et maladie en Afrique, PUF, 1992.
Beneduce, Roberto, Trance e possessione in Africa, Corpi, mimesi, storia, Bollati Boringhieri, 2002.
Crapanzano, Vincent, Tuhami, portrait of a Moroccan, University of Chicago Press, 1985.

b) Global epidemics:
Farmer Paul, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, The University of California Press, 2001.
Farmer, Paul, AIDS and accusation: Haiti and the geography of blame, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992.

c) Psychiatry:
Basaglia, Franco, L’Istituzione negata: rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico, Einaudi, 1974 (nuova ediz. Baldini e Castoldi 2018).
Kleinman, Arthur, Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience, Free Press, 1991.
Cozzi, Donatella Le imperfezioni del silenzio. Riflessioni antropologiche sulla depressione femminile in un'area alpina, Bonanno, 2007.

d) Migration and Ethnopsychiatry:
Taliani, Simona e Vacchiano, Francesco, Altri corpi: antropologia ed etnopsicologia della migrazione, Unicopli, 2006.
Beneduce, Roberto, Etnopsichiatria. Sofferenza mentale e alterità fra storia, dominio e cultura. Carocci, 2007.

e) Drugs and other therapeutic objects:
Schirripa, Pino, La vita sociale dei farmaci. Produzione, circolazione, consumo degli oggetti materiali della cura, Argo, 2015.
Fainzang, Silvie, Farmaci e società. Il paziente, il medico e la ricetta, Angeli, 2009.
Petryna, Adriana, Lakoff Andrew and Kleinman Arthur, Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Market, Practices, Duke University Press, 2006.

f) Trattamenti estetici e prestazioni corporee:
Edmonds, Alexander, Pretty Modern. Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brasil, Duke University Press, 2010.

g) Assisted reproduction:
Mattalucci Claudia, Antropologia e riproduzione. Attese, fratture e ricomposizioni della procreazione e della genitorialità in Italia, Cortina, 2017.

Attendance is not mandatory, but attending students are required to attend the lessons with constancy and participation, intervening in classes and animating the debate on the topics under consideration. Starting from the second part of the course, attending students are required to introduce the day subject by presenting, in small groups, a review of two articles/chapters suggested by the instructor, encouraging questions and generating the discussion with colleagues. The class will then proceed by exploring the questions raised in the presentation and debate, moving progressively toward theoretical analysis.
The exam will be oral, aimed at assessing both the knowledge on the topics covered in the course and the capacity of oral expression with appropriate language. The final grade will take into account the appropriateness of contents and language and, for attending students, the level of involvement and participation in classes and the quality of the presentation.

The course is taught through lectures, audio-visual materials, class discussion and group presentations of selected articles.

Italian

The instructor receives students on Wednesday from 11.30 AM onwards in his study, upon appointment to be previously arranged by email.

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