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Week 14 · Module overview

Week 14 — Health, Illness, and Healing

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Welcome to your Week 14 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A nursing student listening to someone explain a pain and a social-work student helping a family weigh a clinic visit against a home remedy both meet this week's question: how do people explain being unwell?

In plain language

Being sick is something that happens to a body, and it is also something a person lives through and tries to explain. This week you will learn to tell disease (what goes wrong in the body, as a doctor defines it) from illness (what being unwell is like and what it means to the person and the people around them). You will learn to ask about an explanatory model (a person's own account of what caused a problem and what should be done about it). You will see how people mix more than one way of healing, and how structural violence (harm built into the way a society is arranged) shapes who gets sick or hurt. Last, you will read one vendor's back strain at the running market through every one of these tools.

  • Already covered: Week 3 gave you the open-ended interview and emic and etic; Week 13 read witchcraft as an explanation of misfortune.
  • This week: disease and illness, explanatory models, medical pluralism, and structural violence.
  • How they connect: an account of illness is an explanation, heard through an interview.
  • Where we're going next: Week 15, Globalization, Colonialism, and Applied Anthropology.

Focus

How do people experience, explain, and treat being unwell?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] tell disease from illness
  • [ ] ask the five explanatory-model questions openly
  • [ ] read medical pluralism in an everyday scene
  • [ ] explain structural violence and credit it to Galtung

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 14 (about 35 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
  2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
  3. Do the Ethnography Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: sort one illness you have had into its disease side and its illness side.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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