Health and Illness in a Global Context

What is wellness? How do people identify when a person is in a state of dis-ease? And how do answers to these questions and many others around health and wellbeing in different parts of the world reveal not only remarkable diversity but also globalising tendencies, for example around the phenomena of self-care and the commodification of wellness? This subject will help students develop an interdisciplinary and comparative understanding of the critical relationship between health, well-being, disease and culture. The readings and lectures will explore how medical anthropologists have theorised healthcare practices and disease around the world. They will emphasise how local experiences of wellbeing are linked with larger global economic and political processes as well as changing environmental conditions. A range of media representations will be examined to delve into cultural worlds of health, near and far. Readings and tutorial discussions will enrich and complicate our thinking about the connections between individual meaning and collective experience, the structuring of larger historical, political, economic, social and cultural forces impacting wellness, and critical health challenges that face us all in the world today.