This undergraduate course introduces ways anthropologists theorise and research mental disorder, treatment and recovery. It reflects a growing interest in anthropology’s encounter with the key ‘psych’ disciplines and the human and social sciences, evident in the well-spring of new university courses in psychological and psychiatric anthropology in the U.S, Canada and Australia, and the transnational migration of this interest to …
Tag Archives: Biocultural anthropology
Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture
By Philippe Descola
Translated by Janet Lloyd
Foreword by Marshall Sahlins
University of Chicago Press, 2013
488 pages, US$ 65.00 (hardcover)
Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature & Culture is not a modest book. Having first appeared French in 2005, it systematizes some of the ideas previously set out in Descola’s ethnographic work among the Achuar …
Syllabi on culture and mental health
These two courses, one undergraduate and the other graduate, explore the cultural patterning of mental health and healing, of psychological flourishing and disorder. Both courses aim to help students appreciate how the cultural anthropological analysis of mental health can be enriched by (neuro)biological and psychological/ clinical perspectives. The undergraduate course has a “science and technology studies” feel to it, exploring …
Resources for teaching medical anthropology
With the school year approaching, many academic blogs have featured posts about teaching. We’ve run a few of these over the past years, including a number of syllabi related to medical anthropology. You can see them all by clicking on the “Teaching Resources” category in the sidebar, but I’ve also gathered the best of them here — …
Toward a Neuroanthropology of Immersive Online Gaming and Cyberdependence
Since Spring 2008, I’ve been studying videogaming, conducting participant-observation research in and around the World of Warcraft (WoW), interviewing and surveying the citizens of this online community. I have been particularly fascinated by players’ relationships to their WoW “avatars,” the in-game graphical representations of their characters. Via avatars, gamers can temporarily separate or even “dissociate” from …
The Neuroanthropology of Embodiment, Absorption, and Dissociation
Got Absorption? Towards a Neuroanthropology of Play and Ritual
Cross-posted with Neuroanthropology.
On Thursday, Nov. 17th at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal, Canada, I attended a double panel of neuroanthropologists hosted by the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Organized by Christopher Dana Lynn (University of Alabama) and Jeffrey G. Snodgrass (Colorado State University), the panel was entitled …