Introduction to Medical Anthropology in Development

2025/2026

Учебный год

ENG

Обучение ведется на английском языке

3

Кредиты

Кто читает:

Кафедра демографии (Институт демографии имени А.Г. Вишневского)

Статус:

Курс обязательный

Когда читается:

2-й курс, 2 модуль

Преподаватель

Ермолин Илья Васильевич

Course Syllabus

Abstract

The course will introduce a broad range of medical anthropology topics, theoretical approaches and research techniques by examining case studies. Initially I will introduce the frameworks of general anthropology for those for whom anthropology is well unknown discipline. We will use the concepts of culture, risk and resilience as starting points for follow-up discussion in which we will investigate how cultural forces shape issues of health, illness, pandemic and medicine, how the production of specific knowledge shapes perception of health and illness as individual experience through the language and meaning. We will also discuss the field-based methods used by medical anthropologists – and ethnographers in particular – to study illness experience and medical practice in Russia and other countries. Examples of questions include: What is health in anthropology? What are the types of resilience highlighted in medical anthropology (epidemiology), and what is the difference between those types? How are risk and resilience connected to health (including mental health) and disease and how can this connection be studied in the field? How do local cultural practices shape aspects of illness, sex and death? Do you think risks carried challenges that were not appropriately taken into account by the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)? Topics to be covered in the course:•Introduction to Medical Anthropology •Medical Anthropology or Epidemiology?•The dilemmas of Сulture and Health•Cognitive Medical Anthropology•Risk, vulnerability, and resilience as pivotal conceptual frameworks •Methods needed to study the link between culture and healthA particular time will be devoted to studying the methods of field study and further concepts of data analysis. We will pay attention to the following methods: free-listing, pile-sorting, cultural consensus analysis, participant observation, ethnographic interviews. Separately we will take Q-sort methodology during the lecture. The methods are supposed to be used while conducting and then writing the research analytical note.

Learning Objectives

• • To provide conceptual and analytical tools for a comprehensive understanding of health, illness and healing.
• • To apply concepts to the analysis of health issues worldwide.
• • Gain skills in methodology on how to deal with culturally based health practices

Expected Learning Outcomes

• The students gain skills to apply conceptual tools to work with different health-related issues.
• • The students acquire the capacity to develop and apply the methods from the cognitive anthropology and ethnography how this applies to health-related issues.
• The students gain knowledge on how to set out arguments and viewpoints effectively and coherently, orally and in writing.
• The students acquire the capacity to work with specific cases (to make a choice of their own).

Course Contents

• Orientation to the course – clarifying expectations.
• Theoretical approaches in medical anthropology
• Сulture and Health: disease v illness, health v healing: difference in views between medical anthropology and epidemiology
• Cognitive Medical Anthropology
• Risk, vulnerability, and resilience
• Disease, health, and inequality
• Methodology in cognitive anthropology

Assessment Elements

• Hometask assignment
  Each student should do exercises individually/or in groups where relevant. Students are suggested to carry out exercises based on quantitative methods of cognitive medical anthropology (freelisting and pilesorting) and qualitative methods of participant observation, interviews and informal conversation, etc.
• Oral presentation
  Oral presentation should be lasting for seven minutes; five minutes are to be spent for answers that all of the colleagues are welcome to ask. Please remember that you will get seven minutes even in the case if you share final paper with other colleagues. You can agree with each other whether the results will be provided by one of you or it will be joint effort.
• class participation (discussion)
  For each seminar students complete home assignments – respond to theoretical and empirical readings and prepare group presentations. In a group presentation, all members contribute equally, and each contribution builds on the previous one. At the beginning of the course, students split into four working groups and choose the specific area of interest they’d like to study during the course. The lecturer should be informed about the student’s desire to make a presentation in advance before the seminar starts. Presentations presented in class and discussed appropriately are considered the most important in class participation.
• Essay
  By the end of the course, students in groups write an essay in the chosen area drawing on the theoretical ideas and methods studied. The essay should be submitted no later than 11:59 PM, December 18.

Interim Assessment

• 2025/2026 2nd module
  0.3 * Essay + 0.2 * Hometask assignment + 0.1 * Oral presentation + 0.4 * class participation (discussion)

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

• Introducing medical anthropology : a discipline in action, , 2020

Recommended Additional Bibliography

• A companion to cognitive anthropology, , 2011

Authors

• Ermolin Ilia Vasilevich