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RELI 188 Special Topics in Religion (Spring 2017)

SID# 902143 ; Aftab Jassal, Instructor

Cultures of Healing

This course looks at how illness, affliction, and healing are understood and experienced in a global context. In many parts of the world, illness is not defined merely as a physiological problem; rather, it is seen has having important spiritual, aesthetic, social, and political causes and effects. This course will help students develop an appreciation for the culturally and historically patterned ways in which people come to identify and treat bodily, psychological, and social distress.

Readings for the course will be drawn from the fields of ethnomedicine, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of religion, to explore how health, illness, and healing are conceptualized and experienced in different cultures and across different sites of healing. Although it is often assumed that there is a dichotomy between biomedical knowledge, on the one hand, and so-called folk beliefs and practices, on the other, this course will also explore how these modes of thinking and knowing the body, illness, and healing are influenced by each other.  

[Return to Spring 2017 courselist]