Week 14 · Readings & resources

Week 14 — Readings & Resources

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Your primary reading is Chapter 14 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 76–93 minutes for everything. Each group links back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (19–23 min total)

① The body and its meaning

Chapter 14, Section “Tell disease from illness” · Session 1, Segment 1, “Disease and illness” · Remember: disease is what goes wrong in the body as a doctor defines it, and illness is what being unwell is like and what it means.

What is Medical Anthropology? — Society for Medical Anthropology — the professional society's own short description of its field; find the phrase about the experience and distribution of illness, and mark which items on its long list match a section of this week's chapter. Use it while completing the Week-14 module overview. (reading, 5–8 min)
Health & Medicine: Crash Course Sociology #42 — CrashCourse — an overview of how society shapes what people count as health and sickness; as you watch, sort what you hear into the body side and the experience side, the split the chapter calls disease and illness. The figures it gives are the episode's own, not course figures. (video, 11 min) (captions: creator)
Kleinman's Illness Narratives — The Human Condition — an anthropologist's short talk on why clinicians should listen to the stories people tell about being sick, drawn from another book by Kleinman; name one thing a story about illness carries that a one-line clinic note leaves out. The course pins only Kleinman (1980), so treat the book's title, its case examples, and the speaker's other details as the video's own. (video, 7 min) (captions: automatic)

② Many ways to heal, and the questions to ask

Chapter 14, Section “Map the healing systems: ethnomedicine and medical pluralism” · Session 1, Segment 3, “Many ways to heal” · Remember: most people mix more than one way of healing, and an open question about what caused an illness teaches more than a yes-or-no one.

Complementary, Alternative, or Integrative Health: What's In a Name? — National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health — a federal health agency's fact sheet on the words people use for approaches outside conventional care; read the part that sets complementary against alternative, and notice that it sorts healing from the clinic's side, which is one system describing the others. (reading, 8–12 min)
Think Cultural Health Case Study: Cultural and religious beliefs — HHS Office of Minority Health — a two-minute case for health care workers about meeting a person's cultural and religious beliefs in the clinic; write down one open question the worker could have asked to learn the person's own view of her care. This builds on Week 3's work with open-ended interviews and the emic and etic pair, since the person's own account is the emic view. (video, 2 min) (captions: creator)

③ Harm built into arrangements

Chapter 14, Section “Trace harm to arrangements: structural violence” · Session 2, Segment 5, “Harm built into arrangements” · Remember: structural violence is harm done by the way a society is arranged, with no single person throwing a blow, and Galtung coined the term.

Cultural and Structural Violence: Seeing root causes of conflict through the lens of violence — John Filson — a peace-studies instructor explains structural violence as systems and practices that hurt people through exclusion and injustice; the term began in peace research, where Galtung coined it in 1969, before Farmer brought it into anthropology. The video also names a third idea, cultural violence, which this course does not teach, so set it aside. (video, 2 min) (captions: creator)
How do social determinants impact public health? — American Public Health Association — an episode on how the conditions where people live and work shape their health; list two conditions it names and say how each could put some people more in the way of illness than others. Its figures are its own, and its closing ideas about health insurance and school funding are policy proposals this course does not argue. (video, 5 min) (captions: creator)
Embodiment in Anthropology: Sickness, Healing, and How We View the Body — a partial perspective — an anthropology explainer on how social conditions get under the skin and show up in the body; note one study it cites, and say whether it describes disease, illness, or both. The health findings it reports about particular groups are the video's own and are not course figures. (video, 16 min) (captions: creator)
Social determinants of health, fact sheet — World Health Organization — a global health body's fact sheet on how living and working conditions shape health along a social gradient; it gives figures of its own, so write any figure down with its source and year rather than as the course's number. Stop here before the comparisons between rich and poor countries; next week takes up globalization and colonialism. (reading, 10–15 min)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

Concepts of Disease and Health, Naturalism and Constructivism — online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (reference entry) — a reference-work entry; read only section 2, which sets out the debate over whether disease is a fact about biology or a judgment a society makes, and skip the later sections on philosophical models this course does not take up. (reading, 10–15 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

Provenance: Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com