Anthropology of the Body

ANTH 407 Winter 2009 Eugene Raikhel eugene.raikhel@mail.mcgill.ca Seminar: Wednesdays 2:35 - 5:25 PM; 3647 Peel Street Room 102 Office hours: Wednesdays 10:00 12:00 AM; 3647 Peel Street Room 209 In this upper-level seminar in medical anthropology, we will examine the body as a historically and culturally contingent category, a material locus of practices and an object of fashioning and self-identification. What is body in relation to mind? Can we do without these distinctions and, if so, what is there to replace them? Is it possible for ethnography to capture bodily experience in a way which does not reduce it to representation? How does culture shape the body? How are new medical technologies changing the ways in which people think about and inhabit their bodies? What would it mean for anthropology and social theory to start from an understanding of human beings as embodied, sentient beings? In this course we will address these and other questions through lectures, close readings and discussions of key texts and writing assignments. The readings for each class session correspond to the lecture and discussion for that week. I will begin each session by lecturing for about one hour, giving some background and context to that weeks readings. After a short break, a team of two students will give a presentation on the themes and issues in the readings. The rest of the session will be devoted to a discussion of the readings.

Course requirements:
1. Participation 20% Active participation and discussion is very important to this course. It is expected that you will come to each class having read all of the assigned texts and with several discussion questions. You will be marked down for more than one unexcused absence. 2. In class presentation 20% Along with a partner, each of you will give one 1520 minute presentation of the readings for a particular week. This should be a presentation of the themes, issues or problems that run through all of the readings, not a summary of the texts. Your presentation will also serve to open our discussion, so please prepare some discussion questions for the class. 3. Reading response 20% of grade. You will write a reading response on the texts for one of the first seven weeks. Like the presentation, this should not be a summary of the readings but an analysis of a particular issue or debate in the readings for one week. You may not write about the reading for the week you are presenting. The reading response should be turned in on February 18 or earlier. 1500-1700 words. 4. Research paper 40% You will write a research paper on a topic you choose related to the content of the course. A one-page prospectus will be due after break on March 4. A preliminary draft will be due on April 1, when you will be teamed up with a classmate for peer-review. The final paper is due on the last day of class, April 8. 4500-5000 words

Readings:
Required text available at the McGill Bookstore and on 3-hour reserve in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library: Lock, Margaret M and Judith Farquhar. 2007. Beyond the body proper: Reading the anthropology of material life. Duke University Press. All other readings will be available for you to download from WebCT.

Lectures and readings:

Week 1 Jan 7 Introduction and course logistics Week 2 Thursday, Jan 15 at 6:00 PM The social organism and body techniques Scheper-Hughes, N and M M Lock.1987 The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1 (1): 6-41. Mauss, Marcel. 1935, Techniques of the Body, In Lock, M.M. & Farquhar, J., eds., Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life, Duke University Press. (BBP) pp.50-68. Douglas, Mary. 1970. The Two Bodies. pp. 65-81 in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon. Turner, T. [1980] 2007. The social skin. BBP pp. 83-103. Week 3 Jan 21 Phenomenology and embodiment Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1947] 2007. from The Phenomenology of Perception, BBP pp.133-149. Bourdieu, P. 1994. Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power, in Cultures, Power, History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, by Nicolas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner (Eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 155-199. Csordas, T J. 1993 Somatic Modes of Attention. Cultural Anthropology 8 (2): 135-156.

Halliburton, Murphy. 2002 Rethinking Anthropological Studies of the Body: Manas and Bodham in Kerala. American Anthropologist 104 (4): 1123-1134. --NO CLASS ON JAN 28 (Session will be made up) Week 4 Feb. 4 Labor and disciplined bodies Thompson, E.P., 1967, Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism, BBP pp. 495-511 Foucault, Michel. 1984. Docile Bodies, The Means of Correct Training, and Panopticism, in The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, pp. 179-213. Ong, A. 1998, The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia. BBP pp. 512-530. Wacquant, Loc. 1995. Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor Among Professional Boxers. Body and Society 1-1 (March): 65-94. Week 5 Make-up session Monday February 9, 6:00-8:45 PM Sex and gender Film: Sex: Unknown, Nova, 2001. See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gender/ Week 6 Feb 11 Sex, gender and local biologies Barlow, T. 1994. Theorizing Woman: Fun, Guojia, Jiating. In Body, subject and power in china. Ed. T Barlow and A Zito. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. pp. 25389. Martin, Emily. 1991. Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles, BBP. Lock, M. & Kaufert, P., 2001, Menopause, local biologies, and cultures of aging, American Journal of Human Biology, 13(4), pp. 494-504.

Kulick, Don. 1997 Gender of Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. American Anthropologist 99(3): 574-585. Week 7 Feb 18 Reading the body in medicine [Reading response due] Young, A., 1976, Internalizing and externalizing medical belief systems: an Ethiopian example, Soc Sci Med, 10, pp. 147-56. Kuriyama, S. 1987. Pulse Diagnosis in the Greek and Chinese Traditions. BBP. pp. 595-607. Good, Byron. 1994. How Does Medicine Construct Its Objects? In Medicine, Rationality, and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.65-87. Dumit, Joseph. 2003 Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts. Journal of Medical Humanities 24 (1).

--FEB 25 -- BREAK, NO CLASS

Week 8 March 4 Placebo response and contextual healing [Prospectus for final paper due] Levi-Strauss, C.1949 The Effectiveness of Symbols. Structural Anthropology 1:186205. Benedetti, F. 2002. How the Doctor's Words Affect the Patient's Brain. Evaluation & the Health Professions 25 (4): 369. Kaptchuk, T J. 2002 The Placebo Effect in Alternative Medicine: Can the Performance of a Healing Ritual Have Clinical Significance? Ann Intern Med 136: 817-825.

Nichter, Mark, Jennifer Jo Thompson, and Cheryl Ritenbaugh. Reconsidering the Placebo Response from a Broad Anthropological Perspective. Cult Med Psychiatry doi:10.1007/s11013-008-9122-2. Week 9 Mar 11 Interpreting bodily distress: somaticization and sensory experience Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Nervoso. BBP pp. 459-467 Kleinman, Arthur and Joan Kleinman. 1985. Somatization: The Interconnections in Chinese Society Among Culture, Depressive Experiences, and the Meanings of Pain. BBP. pp. 468-474. Kirmayer, L.J., 1992, The Body's Insistence on Meaning: Metaphor as Presentation and Representation in Illness Experience, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 6(4), pp. 323-46. Hinton, D and S Hinton. 2002 Panic Disorder, Somatization, and the New Crosscultural Psychiatry: The Seven Bodies of a Medical Anthropology of Panic. Cult Med Psychiatry 26 (2). Week 10 March 18 Biopower: governing bodies and populations Foucault, Michel. 1980. The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 166-182 in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972/1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon. Hacking, Ian. 1986. Making Up People. BBP. pp. 150-163. Greenhalgh, S. 1994 Controlling Births And Bodies In Village China. American Ethnologist 21 (1): 3-30. Brotherton, P S. 2005 Macroeconomic Change and the Biopolitics of Health in Cuba's Special Period. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 10 (2): 339-369. Week 11 March 25 Race and medicine Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff. 1992 Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Westview Press. pp. 215-234. Lundy Braun et al. Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They? PLoS Medicine. 4(9), 2007

Jonathan Kahn. Race in a Bottle. Scientific American. July 2007. Whitmarsh, I. 2008. Biomedical ambiguity: Race, asthma, and the contested meaning of genetic research in the Caribbean. Cornell Univ Pr. Selections.

Week 12 April 1

Transforming and commodification the body and its parts [Draft of paper due, exchange for peer review] Weiss. Brad. 1992. Plastic Teeth Extraction: The Iconography of Haya GastroSexual Affliction. BBP, pp. 531-549. Lock, Margaret. 2002, The Alienation of Body Tissue and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines. BBP, pp. 567-583 Hacking, I., 2007, Our Neo-Cartesian Bodies in Parts, Critical Inquiry, 34(1), pp. 78105. Edmonds, A., 2007, 'The poor have the right to be beautiful': cosmetic surgery in neoliberal Brazil, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(2), pp. 363-81. Week 13 April 8 Mental illness, addiction and the somatic self [Final paper due] Rose, N., 2007. Neurochemical Selves, in The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. pp. 187-223. Vrecko, Scott. 2006 Folk Neurology and the Remaking of Identity. Mol Interv 6 (6): 300-303.

Sch ull, Natasha D. 2006 Machines, Medication, Modulation: Circuits Of Dependency And Self-Care In Las Vegas. Cult Med Psychiatry 30 (2): 223-247. 1