代做The Politics of Medicine代做Prolog

日期：2025-11-01 11:23

The Politics of Medicine

AIMS & OBJECTIVES

This module is designed to enhance student learning in anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) theory and its relevance to analysing medicine. It aims to equip students with an understanding of how medical policy and practice is imbricated in other disciplines and arenas such as law, economics, and popular representations (advertising, news reporting, etc.). Specifically, the module aims to:

• Expand and hone student learning on the concepts and values inherent to medicine as a science and practice; to challenge the notion of objectivity as “value-free” and understand its historical roots.

• Further develop, at the senior undergraduate level, participants' critical awareness and appreciation of theories of anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), and gain practice in applying these to real-world scenarios, such as legal and historical disputes and how truth comes to be articulated from controversies.

• Delve into key debates in medicine - including vaccines, cancer treatment, and illnesses related to industrial modes of production - and to gain skills in understanding the stakes of such debates, the forms available for debate and adjudication, and how they inflect practice, policy, and experience.

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to:

• Explain and analyse some of the ways that scientific knowledge and objectivity are inflected with value judgements.

• Have a developing understanding of, and insight into, how epistemology, or ways of knowling, affects the politics of medicine.

• Offer reasoned critique and defence of specific medical and evidence-based practices, such as randomized controlled trials, vaccine policy, and cancer prevention.

MODULE OUTLINE AND READINGS

In this module we will critically examine the landscape of medicine from a variety of

disciplinary perspectives, such as anthropology, history and philosophy of science and

medicine, and science and technology studies. We will study the hegemony of

biomedicine in relation to competing medical systems and examine some of the

reasons that underpin its hegemony.

Week I: Which Medicine: Biomedicine in the world

Cure and care have been integral to human cultures and civilisation for centuries.

There exist several systems of medicine, of which biomedicine is just one. In the

opening session of this module, we will situate biomedicine in this broader history of

medicine and understand the wider power structures that underpin its dominance.

Thinking with other systems will show us the non-universality of its model of the

health, disease, and medicine.

Learning objectives:

• To gain a basic overview of the history of medicine

• To understand some of the conditions underlying the hegemony of biomedicine

• To appreciate at least one non-biomedicine based medical system

Core readings

*Anderson, Warwick. 1998. “Where is the postcolonial history of medicine?” Bulletin

of the History of Medicine, 72 (3): 522-530.

*Fanon, Franz. 1965. “Colonialism and medicine.” In A dying colonialism. New York:

Grove Press. pp. 127-141.

*Harrison, Mark. 2015. “A global perspective: Reframing the history of health,

medicine, and disease.” Bullteing of the History of Medicine, 89 (4): 639-689.

*Mol, Annemarie. 2002. “Doing disease.” In The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical

Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822384151-002

*Kuo, Wen-Hua. 2019. “An ecumenical medicine yet to come: reflections on Needham

and medicine.” Isis, 110 (1): 116-121.

https://doi.org/10.1086/702897

OR

*Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1977. “The theory and the practice of psychological

medicine in Ayurveda.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 1 (2): 151-181.

OR

*Konadu, Kwasi. 2008. “Medicine and anthropology in twentieth-century Africa: Akan

medicine and encounters with medical anthropology.” African Studies Quarterly, 10

(2-3)

Week II : Life, health, and medicine: Competing ideas

Today we discuss the model of health, disease, and medicine contained in

contemporary biomedicine and why it is political. At the core of this model is the

concept of life, its longevity, and vitality, which inform. strategies of keeping life

disease-free as far as possible. We see read some of the competing ideas that

undergird our ideas of health and the aims of medicine.

Learning outcomes:

• Rose’s concept of Life Itself as the basis for understanding the contemporary

politics of medicine

• Prevention vs cure as different strategies

• Critically examine the politics of life without disease in eugenics and its

shadow in newer technologies, such as genomic medicine.

Core readings:

Rose, Nikolas. 2007. “Biopolitics in the twenty-first century.” In The Politics of Life

Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. New Jersey:

Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400827503-004

• Prevention

Mahajan, Manjari. 2018. “Rethinking prevention: shifting conceptualisations of

evidence and interventions in South Africa’s AIDS epidemic.” BioSocieties, 13: 188-

169. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-017-0062-3

• Eugenics and racialised medicine

Benjamin, Ruha. 2017. “What do we owe each other?: Moral debts and racial distrust

in experimental stem cell science.” In Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US

Medicine. N Ehlers and LR Hinkson (eds). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt65v.9

Taussig, Karen-Sue, Rayna Rapp, and Deborah Heath. 2005. “Flexible eugenics:

Technologies of the self in the age of genetics.” In J Inda (ed). Anthropology of

Modernity: Foucault, governmentality, and life politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 194-

212.

Weingart, Peter. 1995. “Eugenics –medical or social science?” Science in Context, 8

(1): 197-207.

Week III: Illness, Injury, Trauma, Pain

Telling and describing symptoms and feelings is a crucial to diagnosis – and sometimes

the very first step in seeking medical help. In this week’s lecture, we examine the

terms with which we communicate ill-health and their significance, with the help of seminal work.

Learning outcome:

• To understand the complexity of diagnosis

• To understand the different categories of symptoms and diagnoses and their

relationship to everyday life.

• The interplay of science and language in diagnosis and experience of illness.

Core Reading

*Rosenberg, Charles. “The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual

Experience.” The Milbank Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2002): 237-260.

https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.t01-1-00003

*Luhrmann, Tania. 2016. “‘I’m schizophrenic’: How diagnosis can change identity in

the United States.” In T. M. Luhrmann and J Marrow (eds.). Our most troubling

madness: Case studies in schizophrenia across culture. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

*Das, Veena. 2015. “How the body speaks.” In Affliction: Health, disease, poverty.

Fordham University Press. . https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823261833-003

*Strong, Adrianne and Megan Cogburn. 2025. “Pain management”. Annual Review of

Anthropology, 54.

*Kienzler, Hanna. 2022. “Symptomspeak: Women’s struggle for history and health in

Kosovo.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 46: 739-760.

Additional readings:

Lezaun, Javier. 2018. “The deferred promise of radical cure: pharmaceutical

conjugations of malaria in global health era.” Economy and Society, 47 (4): 547-571.

DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2018.1528075

Bhangu, Shagufta. 2020. “Pain’s records: an anthropological account of medical

documentation in South Asia.” Sciendo

Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

Solomon, Harris. 2017. “Shifting gears: traffic and triage in urban India.” Medical

Anthropoolgy Quarterly, 31 (3): 349-364. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12367

Week IV : The Dangerous World: Contagion and Immunity

The recent pandemic brought to forefront the fragility of our environment and the our

bodies are always on the brink of a new threat from old and new contagions. Using

the pandemic as an example to think with, we will explore how the world is both the

source of contagion as well as cure. Using an inter-species perspective, we will

examine the politics of containing contagion and how medication itself result in new

forms of ‘resistance’.

Learning outcomes:

• To understand new perspectives on the sources of contagion

• To gain a critical understanding of strategies of containment

• To critically understand the limits of medicine and bodily resistance.

Core readings:

• Eradication

Bhattacharya, Sanjoy. “Re-Devising Jennerian Vaccines?: European Technologies,

Indian Innovation and the Control of Smallpox in South Asia, 1850-1950.” Social

Scientist 26, no. 11/12 (1998): 27-66.

OR

Cueto, Markus and Paul Wiendling. 1995.“The cycles of eradication: The Rockfeller

Foundation and Latin American public health.” In International Health Organisations

and Movements, 1918-1940. ttps://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511599606.013

Puetz, Nathalie. 2021. “Crisis as pre-existing condition: Yemen between cholera,

coronavirus, and starvation.”. In Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade (eds). Pandemic

exposures: Economy and society in the time of Coronavirus. Chicago: HAU Books. Pp.

295-320.

• Zoonosis

Keck, Frederick. 2019. “The genealogy of animal diseases in Social Anthropology 1870-

2000.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 33: 24-41.

https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12442

OR

• Microbes

Paxson, H. and S. Helmreich (2014). “The perils and promises of microbial abundance:

Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas.” Social

Studies of Science 44 (2): 165-193.

Lorimer, Jamie (2020). “Introduction.” In The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage

Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Resistance (AMR)

Landecker, H. (2016). “Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History.” Body &

Society 22 (4): 19–52

Week V: The Dangerous or the Resourceful Body: New sources

of disease and immunity

One of the key perspectival shifts in recent years has been the awareness the human

body itself being a multispecies ecology. While such presence would have been

regarded as purely parasitic and therefore disease-making, today the view on the role

of microbial life hosted by and inside the body is being studied for its health-giving

capacities. While it is not entirely new to mine the body itself to heal it, modern

biomedical advances allow for an altogether different scale of bodily resources from

organs to stem-cells, for new kinds of medical provision.

Learning outcomes:

• Gain a critical understanding on the changed perception of the body in

medicine

• Have a critical understanding of the use of bodily resources as medicine

• Understand the ethical and regulatory issues arising as a result.

• Auto-immune diseases

Lorimer, Jamie. 2019. “Hookworms makes us human: the microbiome,

ecoimmunology, and a probiotic turn in Western medicine. Medical Anthropology

Quarterly, 33 (1): 61-79.

• Organs and stem-cells

Crowley-Matoka, Megan and Sherine Hamdy. 2018. “Gendering the gift of life: family

politics and kidney donations in Egypt and Mexico.” Medical Anthropology, 35 (1): 31-

44. 0.1080/01459740.2015.1051181

• Gene-editing and genomic medicine

Biagioli, Mario and Alain Pottage. 2021. “Patenting personalised medicine: molecules,

information, and the body.” Osiris, 36, 221-240. https://doi.org/10.1086/713991

WEEK VI no class

Week VII: Infrastructures of harm

This week we explore the wider environment in which human bodies exist, and

examine the health and existential risks increasingly emanating from our “surrounds”

(Abdoumalique Simone 2022) in the wake of industrialisation, natural disasters, and

extreme climate. What are the new forms of vulnerability, whom and where do they

affect? Are “lifestyle. hacks” provided by the wellness industry the only medicine

available to comabt these harms?

Learning outcomes:

• To understand the nature of contemporary industrial and industrial scale harms

to human health

• To gain a critical understanding of “pollution” and “toxicity”

• To gain an understanding of responses to infrastructural harms

Core readings:

Adams, Vincanne. 2017. What’s making our children sick?: Exploring the link between

GM foods, glyphosate, and gut health. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green

Publishing. Introduction, Ch 1

Lora-Wainwright, Anna. 2021. Resigned Activism: Living with pollution in rural China.

Massachussets: MIT Press. Ch 2, 4.

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution is colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Morimoto, Ryo. 2022. “A wild boar chase: Ecology of harm and a half-

.life politics in Fukushima.” Cultural Anthropology, 37 (1): 69-98.

Nielsen, Carrie. 2021. “Brains and behaviour, and lead.” In Unleaded: How changing

gasoline changed everything. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Additional readings:

Bhatia, Tathagata. 2022. “Toxicity 2: The violence of thresholds in Philadelphia.”

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 46 (4): 698-710.

Chakrabarti, Dipesh. 2009. “The climate of history: Four theses.” Critical Inquiry,

35(2): 197-222.

Eberhardt, Maeve. 2022. “‘You probably have a parasite’:Neoliberal risks and the

discursive construction of the body in the wellness industry.” Language in Society,

Evers, Chrifton. 2018. “Men’s polluted leisure in the Anthropocene: Place attachment

and well-being in an industrial coastal setting”. Leisure Sciences, 46 (8): 1191-1211.

Farmer, Paul. 2004. Pathologies of power: Health, human rights, and the new war on

the poor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Any chapter

Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The politics and poetics of infrastructure.” 42: 327-343.

Lock, Margaret. 2019. “Toxic life in the Anthropocene”. In Jeremy McClancy (ed.).

Exotic no more: Anthropology for the contemporary world. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and

endurance in late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Simone, Abdoumalique. 2022. The surrounds: Urban life within and beyond capture.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Simpson, N., E. Storer, and S. Duale. Forthcoming. “Hostile environments: Mould,

race, and blame amidst Birmingham’s housing crisis. Environment and Planning D:

Society and Space.

Summers, Lachlann. 2025. “Touched by deep time: Earthquake sickness in Mexico

City.” Cultural Anthropology, 40 (3): 463-492.

Week VIII: Infrastructures of medicine

What kind of infrastructures come together to develop and deliver medicine? Access

to healthcare is largely dependent on power structures. This week we explore the

entanglement of capital, science, law, and people in the making and delivering of

medicine in contemporary times at different scales. We will read the presence of

hospitals, pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, and community care in this light.

Learning objectives:

• To gain an understanding of the scale, diversity, and scope of health and

medical infrastructures

• To critically understand the role of capital and science in the making of

medicine

• To critically assess the violence of medical infrastructures

Essential readings:

Abadia-Barrero, Cesar Ernesto. 2022. Health in ruins: The capitalist destruction of

medical care in a Colombian maternity hospital. Durham: Duke University Press.

Especially Ch 2, 4

Darian-Smith, Eve. 2021. “Dying for the economy: Disposable people and economies of

death in the Global North.” State Crime Journal, 10 (1): 61-79.

Ecks, Stefan. 2022. Living worth: Value and values in global pharmaceutical markets.

Durham: Duke University Press. Ch 5

Gaudilliere, Jean-Paul and Kaushik Sunder Rajan. 2021. “Making valuable health:

Pharmaceuticals, global capital, and alternative political economies.” BioSocieites,

16: 313-322

Mcdowell, Andrew. 2024. Breathless: Tuberculosis, inequality, and care in rural India.

Stanford: Standford University Press. Chapter 5 (“Mud”).

Montesi, L., M.P. Prates, S. Gibbon, and L.R. Bario. 2023. “Situating Lating American

critical epidemiology: The case of Covid 19 vaccines and indigenous collectives in

Brazil and Mexico.” Medical Anthropology Theory, 10 (2): 1-29.

Petryana, Adriana. 2009. When experiments travel: Clinical trials and the global

search for human subjects. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Ch 4

Street, Alice. 2014. Biomedicine in an unstable place: Infrastructure and personhood

in Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press.

Week IX : The technology of care

Care and medical interventions are intimately linked. This week we will explore how

new advances in biotechnologies and technologies of care are changing the ways in

which the frontiers of intervention and life itself is being reconfigured. We will

examine these in issues in relation to the ethical questions raised in new advances

such as gene-editing and cryo-medicine, and technologically assisted care such as by

relatively low-tech interventions such as M-health and the relatively new and high-

tech AI enabled care.

Learning outcomes:

• Understand the role technoscience will play in the future of medical care.

• Develop an understanding of the social fall-outs of AI in healthcare

• Gain an understanding of the ethical issues posed by these advances

Burchardt, Maria and Edwin Ameso. 2024. “Bloodstream: Notes towards an

anthropology of digital logistics in healthcare.” Anthropology and Medicine, 31: 215-

231.

Farman, Abou. 2019. “Health beyond the carbon barrier: convergence, immortality,

and transhuman health.” Medical Anthropology Theory, 6 (3): 161-185.

Jasanoff, Sheila and Benjamin Hurbult. 2018. “A global observatory for gene-editing.”

Nature, 555: 435-437.

Hamet and Tremblay 2019 Artificial intelligence and medicine. Metabolism,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.metabol.2017.01.011

Hampshire, et al 2015. “Informal m-health: how are young people using mobile

phones to bridge healthcare gaps in Sub-Saharan Africa. Social Science and Medicine,

142, 90-99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.07.033

Krupar, Shiloh and Nadine Ehlers. 2024. “The racial spectacular: Pandemic

governance through dashboards and state biosecurity.” Science, Technology, and

Human Values, https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241265641

Week X: Talking cures: Therapeutics beyond biomedicine

Non-medicine based therapeutics have had long traditions across history and cultures,

from shamanic healing and spirit possession to bodily interventions like acupuncture.

Despite their diversity, they share the unitary model of the mind and the body,

especially in relation to health.

Sigmund Freud was a trained neuroscientist which he abandoned. His influence on the

twentieth century and our way of thinking about the mind, its health, and ways to

(re)gain it cannot be underestimated. In this session we explore Freudian

psychoanalysis in relation to other traditions of talking cures, and in the relation to

the medicalisation of mental health in the age of neuroscience.

Learning objectives:

• To develop an understanding of non-medicine-based therapy for mental health

• To situate psychoanalysis in the wider context of non-medicine based

therapeutics

• To critically assess the relevance of talking cures for mental health in the age

of neuroscience.

Core readings:

*Modell, Arnold. 2012. “Psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and the unconscious self.”

Psychoanalytic Review, 99 (4): 475-483.

*Ryang, Sonia. 2017. “A critique of medicalisation: three instances.” Anthropology

and Medicine, 24 (3): 248-260.

*Cook, Joanna. 2016. “Mindful in Westminster: The politics of meditation and the

limits of neoliberal critique.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 (1): 61-91.

Additional readings:

Varma, Saiba. 2012. “Where there are only doctors: counsellors as psychiatrists in

Indian-administered Kashmir.” Ethos, 40 (4): 517-535.

Berg, Henrik. 2021. “Why only efficiency, and not efficacy, matters in psychotherapy

practice.” Frontiers in Psychology, 12.

Porath, Nathan, 2013. “Freud among the Orang Sakai: the father-archetype, the

talking cure, and the transference in a Sumatran shamanic healing complex.

Anthropos, 108 (1): 1-18.

El-Shakry, Omnia. 2017. “Islam and psychoanalysis” In The Arabic Freud:

Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Chapter 1. New Jersey: Princeton

University Press.

Moore, Henrietta. 2007. “Body, mind, and the world.” In The Subject of

Anthropology: Gender, Symbolism, and Psychoanalysis. Chapter 1. Cambridge: Polity

Press.