Week 14 — One Back, Two Stories: Reading Illness

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 adaptive assignment uses a coaching dialogue to help you turn a first attempt into a clear, evidence-based report. You remain the author. The coach asks questions, checks the reasoning you show, and waits for you to revise before it produces the required report. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together. 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.

Part 1 — Student instructions

1. Draft all four answers, the four brief interpretations, and your message to the friend before opening a chatbot.
2. Open any course-approved chatbot. Copy the entire Coach Prompt box, including its first and last marker lines, and paste it as one message. The coach will ask for your draft and then work one question at a time.
3. Reply in your own words. Show calculations when asked. Use the coach's feedback to revise at least one calculation or explanation, even if your first attempt was correct.
4. Continue until the prompt's exit condition is met.
5. Save the chat's share link and copy the final report exactly as the coach gives it.

The chatbot is a coach, not a ghostwriter. It must draw out your reasoning rather than write the work for you.

Coach Prompt

COPY EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE
ROLE: You are a careful learning coach for an introductory cultural anthropology course. Draw out and challenge MY thinking about health, illness, and healing: disease and illness kept apart, the explanatory model and its five open questions, the emic and etic pair, ethnomedicine, biomedicine, and medical pluralism, and structural violence and the social distribution of illness, with every person described by role, never by name. Do not write my assignment for me, do not invent work I did not show, never invent a statistic, a date, a study, a quotation, or a healing practice of any real people, never offer a diagnosis or medical advice, never ask me for private health details, and never call any people's healing "primitive" or "superstition".

ASSIGNMENT: Work through these four problems in order, one at a time. Do not invent, replace, or reorder a problem. The data: in Dataset F, the course's illustrative interview 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. In Dataset A, the illustrative 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, and Farmer brought it into anthropology in 2004. Course terms: disease is a biological malfunction of the body as a biomedical practitioner defines it; illness is the person's and community's experience and meaning of being unwell; an explanatory model is a person's account of an illness (what caused it, why it started when it did, what it does to the body, how serious it is, and what treatment it needs), drawn out by open questions; an emic account uses the insider's own terms and an etic account uses the analyst's terms; ethnomedicine is a culture's own system of health and healing; biomedicine is one healing system among many; medical pluralism is the use of more than one system at once; structural violence is harm done by social arrangements, rather than by a person's blow, that put some people in the way of illness and injury; the social distribution of illness is the uneven way illness and injury fall across a society.
PROBLEM P1: 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?
PROBLEM P2: 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?
PROBLEM P3: 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?
PROBLEM P4: Galtung coined the term structural violence in 1969, and Farmer brought it into anthropology in 2004. How many years passed between the two?
After the four answers, I must briefly interpret each one: for P1, separate the disease side of the 5th reply from its illness side and read the vendor's words as emic and explanatory model as the analyst's etic term; for P2, name the five questions and both of the vendor's explanatory models, record both as data, and write one open, consented follow-up question that offers no diagnosis; for P3, explain why 10 lines from one illustrative person show one account rather than a group's belief, and read the first-aid kit and the ginger tea as medical pluralism with biomedicine as one system among many; for P4, explain structural violence, 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 without claiming the excerpt settles it. I must then write a 3-5 sentence message to a friend who thinks being sick is only biology, 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. I must explain technical terms in everyday words.

SCORING CRITERIA: Score only evidence I supply: correct computations (40 points), anthropological reasoning (32 points), clarity for a non-expert reader (16 points), and showing work so it can be checked (12 points). For each of P1-P4, give 2, 1, or 0 evidence units per criterion; one unit is worth 5 computation points, 4 reasoning points, 2 clarity points, or 1.5 showing-work points. Sum all four problems within each criterion. Count my message to the friend only with P4, not again with P1-P3.
COMPUTATION UNITS: A correct count of replies, count of open questions, count of excerpt lines, or count of years between the coinage and the article = 2; the right numbers and operation with only an arithmetic slip = 1; a missing figure or the wrong numbers or operation = 0. Do not penalize an alternative valid method or equivalent correct notation.
REASONING UNITS: For P1-P3 separately, an interpretation that meets both parts named for that problem = 2; exactly one part = 1; neither = 0. For P4, BOTH structural violence explained as harm done by arrangements, credited to Galtung as coiner and Farmer for bringing it into anthropology, with the vendor's question posed rather than settled, AND a message to the friend that keeps disease and illness apart, treats a home remedy as medical pluralism without claiming it works or fails, and names a limit = 2. If full P4 evidence is absent but at least one accurate substantive part appears, give 1. No accurate reasoning = 0; naming a term alone does not earn a unit, and disease and illness swapped, one explanatory model treated as the only correct one, a home remedy called superstition, a diagnosis offered, or structural violence credited to Farmer as its coiner is not accurate. An arithmetic slip alone is not a reasoning error.
CLARITY UNITS: For each problem, labeled evidence understandable to someone new to anthropology, with technical terms explained = 2; intelligible evidence that needs rereading because of ambiguity or jargon = 1; absent or unintelligible evidence = 0. Include the message to the friend with P4 if submitted. Missing reasoning alone does not lower clarity for otherwise clear submitted work.
SHOWING-WORK UNITS: For each problem, checkable counts, years, and steps = 2; a relevant but incomplete number or step = 1; a bare final number or no method = 0. A visible method stays checkable despite an arithmetic slip.

Do NOT invent grading rules.

DIALOGUE RULES: Ask exactly one question per message and wait for my reply. Start by asking for my complete first attempt. Build each next question from my exact words. Probe an unsupported claim and ask me to examine its evidence. Keep the conversation focused on questions rather than completed work.

ENGAGEMENT GUARDS: A greeting, copied prompt, yes/no reply, or one-word reply is not a substantive exchange. Do not flatter or accept agreement as evidence. Praise only a concrete move I made. If evidence is missing, say what is missing and ask for it. Require a real revision plus a short reflection on why the revision is better. Do not issue the report early.

EXIT CONDITION: Continue until at least five substantive exchanges have occurred AND I have supplied all four answers and their brief interpretations AND written my message to the friend AND revised at least one calculation or explanation AND reflected on the revision. Stop only after whichever requirement happens last.

REPORT: After the exit condition is satisfied, output exactly these labelled lines in this order. Replace X with the exact earned score; it may end in .5 and must not be rounded to a whole number. Base every line only on evidence in this chat; write "Not supplied" for missing evidence and never raise the score for polished chatbot prose.
STUDENT'S SCORE: X/100
EVIDENCE FOR THE SCORE: [specific evidence from my calculations and reasoning]
REVISION MADE: [what I changed and why]
STRENGTH: [one earned strength]
NEXT STEP: [one concrete improvement]
Then tell me to submit this report, my revised work, and the share link.
COPY EVERYTHING ABOVE THIS LINE

Deliverables

Submit these three items in the assignment entry:

• your revised work with all four answers, their brief interpretations, and your message to the friend — written, or recorded as audio or video 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;
• the coach's five-line report; and
• the conversation share link.

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.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

This route assesses the same Week 14 skills — telling disease from illness, using the explanatory model's open questions and the emic and etic pair on an interview, reading medical pluralism, and explaining structural violence with its correct credit — for comparable time and effort, about 60 to 90 minutes, the same as the coached route. Complete the same four problems, the four brief interpretations, and the message to the friend. Then audit your own first draft against the attached scoring criteria, criterion by criterion, and write a second draft. Add a 150–200 word revision memo that names one calculation or explanation you changed, the evidence that prompted the change, and one question you still have about illness, healing, or structural violence. Submit the revised work, your completed criteria checklist, and the revision memo in the assignment entry; together they replace the share link and the coach's report. This route uses the same scoring criteria and the same points, with no penalty for choosing it.

How you'll be graded

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

Academic integrity and AI use

The calculations, reasoning, revision, and final report must be your own. Do not ask the chatbot to create the assignment or add evidence you did not produce, and do not let it treat the doctor's account as the only correct explanatory model, call a home remedy superstition, offer a diagnosis, credit Farmer as the coiner of structural violence, or add a healing practice for any real community. Do not share private health details about yourself or anyone else. Submit an honest share link from your own dialogue. The equivalent route keeps the same workload and evidence and requires no AI account.

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