Psychological Anthropology

This course addresses the social relations and cultural contexts in which mental health, mental illness, and medical knowledge about the psyche are entangled and produced. We engage cross-cultural approaches to mental conflicts and pathologies: psychoanalysis, biomedical psychiatry, ethnopsychiatry, transcultural psychiatry, and religious and 'alternative' practices of diagnosis and healing. Drawing on ethnographic and clinical studies as well as documentary films, we examine how lines are drawn between normal and pathological, and explore the intertwining of psyche, body, and morality in human experience and behavior.