ANTH325

This course introduces students to fundamental questions in medical anthropology through an engagement with surgical procedures that remake the body and its world. A practice at once familiar and strange, we center surgical interventions to ground abstract concepts of social and political relations firmly in the materiality of the human body. We examine the concepts of belief and belonging through analyzing male circumcision; cultural relativism and its limits through female genital cutting; the constitution of race through cosmetic procedures that reshape the eyes and nose; nationalism and patriotism through the rehabilitation of soldiers' bodies; the constitution of sex and gender through trans- and intersex genital surgeries; the ethical pull of kinship through in-family kidney donation; economic globalization through surgical tourism; and the concept of the individual subject through post-amputation phantom limb pain and the medical imperative to separate conjoined twins. These procedures invite us to consider the body as a site at which particular ideas about what is \"normal\" and what is \"good\" quite literally find their form. They make manifest the economic, racial, political and ethical forces through which contemporary life and value unfold. Building on the foundations of Tier I anthropology courses, this course introduces students to the unique ways that anthropology engages the practices and beliefs at the heart of medicine. This is a Tier II GenEd course.