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Im Seminar beschäftigen wir uns mit Grundbegriffen, theoretischen Debatten und wegweisenden Ethnografien der Medical Anthropology. Obwohl der Fokus auf Südasien liegen wird, werden wir auch über Südasien hinaus gehende Debatten in der gegenwärtigen Medical Anthropology und - je nach studentischen Interessen - auch ethnografisches Material aus anderen Regionen behandeln. Als einer der schnellst wachsenden Teilbereiche der Ethnologie untersucht die Medical Anthropology Gesundheit, Krankheit, Heilung und Sorge als soziale Phänomene. Im Zentrum stehen krankheits- und gesundheitsbezogene Ideen, Erfahrungen, Praktiken und Materialitäten sowie strukturelle und politische Kontexte der Gesundheitversorgung in einer zunehmend verflochtenen Welt.  Wir beschäftigen uns mit Infektionskrankheiten, chronischen Erkrankungen, psychischer Gesundheit und mit Besessenheit, mit biomedizinischer Versorgung wie auch traditioneller Medizin und rituellem Heilen. Das Feld ‚Global Health‘ ist dabei nicht nur ein wichtiges Untersuchungsfeld geworden, sondern  bietet zunehmend ein Arbeitsfeld für Medical Anthropology.  Wir werden uns daher auch kritisch mit den neuen Akteuren, Technologien, Zielen und Metriken von Global Health beschäftigen.

Ethnographies as long-hauled research reports that combine detailed descriptions of social lives with analyses of their symbolisms and practices, used to be carried out mostly by anthropologists, and also by sociologists. In recent years, however, they have become adopted by several other academic disciplines and specialities wishing to provide more qualitative detail to their studies. While it is true, as Ingold claimed, that anthropology is not limited to ethnography, it is also true that anthropological ethnographies are quite distinct from those produced within other scholarly disciplines. In this course, we will revise and discuss the characteristics of good anthropological ethnographies, in order to better identify the defining features of our disciplinary contributions to this genre. We will combine reading ethnographic monographs with articles and book excerpts reflecting about qualities of anthropological thought, research, analyses, and writing. This course is geared to provide critical tools to identify and assess ethnographic texts. The resulting repertoire of critical tools will thus also help examine narratives produced by anthropologists using other media

Throughout his career, Thomas Hylland Eriksen has used his anthropological lens to shed light on some of the key questions of our time. He has used the toolkit of ethnographic investigations to discuss ethnicity, nationalism, multiculturalism, globalisation, and climate change. Apart from this, he has also provided some memorable introductions to our discipline and insisted on the need for anthropologists to engage with the public sphere. He has argued that the valuable and rich ethnographic analyses produced in our discipline should play a part in wider debates. His body of work shows a particular style of intellectual involvement with complex problems. In his native Norway, he is a well-known public intellectual. Furthermore, from his vantage point in Scandinavia, he scrutinises the history of our discipline’s main founding schools classified according to the nation states that housed them: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States. In this course, we will read some of Eriksen’s texts to explore how he has combined detailed ethnographic analyses with profound examination of planetary situations.