WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2015-2016       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Ritual, Health, and Healing

ANTH 289
Spring 2016 not offered
Crosslisting: SISP 289
Course Cluster: Health Studies, Service-Learning

Modern medicine has long imagined itself in opposition to and better than so called traditional medicine as well as ritual and religious healing. We will challenge this dichotomy in this seminar, exploring on the one hand the phenomenologies and politics of encounter between local systems of healing and global biomedical knowledge and on the other, the moral and material worlds of ritual and religious healing. What kinds of mode of knowing are rituals? How do rituals heal and what do they heal? What can rituals contribute to the health of individuals and communities with health understood as a political project in these dire times of environmental toxicity, world hunger, wars, and economic inequity? How might ritual and bodies talk back to hegemonic power?

Topics will be the intersections of illness, subjectivity, and socio-historical experience; spirit possession; shamanism; indigenous medicine; gender and healing; epistemologies of embodiment; colonialism and affliction. We will also look at emergent integrative models in modern medicine.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: None

Last Updated on DEC-09-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459