ARAB 214: Medicine and Modernity in the Arab World
The course introduces students to questions of medicine and modernity in the Arab world from the 19th century to the present. It takes medicine as a lens for understanding the formation of the modern Arab world, connecting medical practices, institutions, and understandings of the body, on one hand, with wider formation like colonialism, nationalism, gender norms, state power, violence, technology, or religion, on the other hand. The course approaches medicine from an anthropological perspective and provides in this way an introduction to the field of medical anthropology, a domain of inquiry that approaches health and disease not simply as biological states, but also as cultural and historical processes. SS, BN.