Illness and Healing

• • A week-by-week guide to the topics you will explore in this subject will be provided in your study materials.

Equivalent subjects

You should not enrol in this subject if you have successfully completed any of the following subject(s) because they are considered academically equivalent:

• MAQ-ANT202 (Not currently available)
• MAQ-ANTX202-Illness and Healing (No longer available)

You must have successfully completed the following subject(s) before starting this subject:

• MAQ-ANTX1006-Drugs Across Cultures (No longer available)
• MAQ-ANTX2051-Human Evolution and Diversity (No longer available)

Others

NCCW (pre-2020 units): ANT202, ANTH202, ANTH274, ANTX202 NCCW (2020 and onwards): ANTH2002 Illness and Healing Pre-requisite: 40 cps at 1000 level or above

Additional requirements

• Other requirements -

  Students who have an Academic Standing of Suspension or Exclusion under Macquarie University's Academic Progression Policy are not permitted to enrol in OUA units offered by Macquarie University. Students with an Academic Standing of Suspension or Exclusion who have enrolled in units through OUA will be withdrawn.

This unit introduces a perspective on illness and healing that opens up when we give central importance to human experiences of what it is to be ill or to be healed. This means that we do not necessarily have to choose between biology and sociology, between individual and culture. These elements get integrated – and this insight comes through in the more holistic understandings of “alternative” therapies as well as in the accounts we have of healing traditions from around the world. But how and where does this integration occur? To answer this, we need to refer to experience, both individual and collective. The unit will give priority to richly experiential accounts made available in ethnographies, as well as in other kinds of writing such as literature and introduce a perspective called phenomenology. As we seek to understand the wide variety of ways in which different cultural histories have understood what it means to be ill or to be healed, we will necessarily go deeper into some of anthropology’s most fundamental challenge – it tells us that what it means to be ‘human’ is fundamentally a relationship to the world around us, and that world has been understood in very different ways across time and place.

• Essay (40%)
• Weekly online quizzes (20%)
• Tutoial Participation (15%)
• Mid session quiz (25%)

For textbook details check your university's handbook, website or learning management system (LMS).