Week 14 — One Back, Two Stories: Reading Illness — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 13 of the term — work four short problems from the vendor's interview, the market's healing resources, and the history of one term, read them as an anthropologist, and explain illness and structural violence to someone who thinks being sick is only biology.

This week you met disease and illness, Kleinman's explanatory model and its five open questions, ethnomedicine, biomedicine, and medical pluralism, cultural concepts of distress, and structural violence, coined by Galtung and brought into anthropology by Farmer. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who thinks being sick is only biology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3's open-ended interview, emic and etic pair, and fieldwork ethics, on Week 4's emic terms in the vendor's interview, and on Week 13's account of how, in the late 1920s, the Azande explained why misfortune struck particular people at a particular moment.

The task

The week's shared material is Dataset F, the course's illustrative interview excerpt, and Dataset A, the illustrative market, both constructed for this course. From them:

• in the excerpt, an unnamed vendor who has sold at the market for 20 years answers 5 questions; the first 4 replies carry the 4 emic terms ("regulars", "seconds", "the swap", "the bell"), and the 5th reply is: "My back's not what it was. Twenty years of crates. My wife says it's the cold mornings, my doctor says it's the lifting.";
• the excerpt holds the interviewer's 5 questions and the vendor's 5 replies;
• the explanatory model asks five open questions: what caused an illness, why it started when it did, what it does to the body, how serious it is, and what treatment it needs;
• the market has 24 stalls; the market office keeps a first-aid kit, and one vendor brings ginger tea for anyone with a cold;
• Galtung coined structural violence in 1969, in "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research", and Farmer brought it into anthropology in 2004, in "An Anthropology of Structural Violence".

A friend sees your notes and says, "Being sick is only biology. The doctor's account is the one that counts, home remedies are superstition, and violence means someone hit you." Your job is to reply the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. In the course's illustrative interview, the first 4 replies carry the 4 emic terms, and 1 more reply carries the back strain. How many replies does the vendor give in all?
2. The explanatory model has 5 open questions, and the vendor's reply about the back strain touches only 1 of them. How many questions stay open for a follow-up interview?
3. The course's illustrative interview excerpt has 5 questions from the interviewer and 5 replies from the vendor. How many lines does the excerpt hold in all?
4. Galtung coined the term structural violence in 1969, and Farmer brought it into anthropology in 2004. How many years passed between the two?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: separate the disease side of the 5th reply (the doctor's account, the lifting) from its illness side (my back's not what it was), and explain why the vendor's own words are an emic account while "explanatory model" is the analyst's etic term.
• Problem 2: name the five explanatory-model questions and the vendor's two explanatory models, record both as data rather than picking a winner, and write one open follow-up question about a question the reply leaves untouched, to be asked only with consent and with no diagnosis.
• Problem 3: explain why 10 lines from one illustrative person's interview show one account rather than what vendors in general believe, and read the market's first-aid kit and ginger tea as medical pluralism, with biomedicine as one healing system among many.
• Problem 4: explain structural violence as harm done by social arrangements rather than by a person's blow, credit Galtung as its coiner and Farmer for bringing it into anthropology, and pose the question of what arrangements put a vendor in the way of 20 years of lifting crates without claiming the excerpt settles it.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks being sick is only biology, that home remedies are superstition, and that violence always means someone hit you. Write a 3–5 sentence message that keeps disease and illness apart; treats a home remedy as part of medical pluralism without claiming that it works or fails; explains structural violence as harm with no single attacker; and names one limit, such as that the interview in this task is illustrative. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good reply is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who says that "a cast is only plaster on a bone." Model reply: "The cast holds the bone still, which is what the doctor treats, but for a guitarist with a broken wrist it also means canceled shows and weeks without the music that pays the rent. Those losses shape how soon the guitarist is tempted to play again. Asking what an injury costs a person helps anyone give advice that fits the person's life. One caveat: one guitarist's story does not show how everyone lives with a cast."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the figures in the problems without guessing which figures or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the friend, keeping disease and illness apart, treating a home remedy as part of medical pluralism without claiming it works or fails, explaining structural violence as harm with no single attacker, and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the figures you used, so your answers are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled two-column sketch of the vendor's reply, disease side and illness side, described in words with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Name people only by role, offer no diagnosis, share no private health details about yourself or anyone else, and do not borrow a healing practice or a health figure about any real people from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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