Corsi di Studio del Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

No particular prerequisite is asked to attend the Class. The programme of the course in anthropology has a markedly interdisciplinary approach (psychology, psychoanalysis, history). If students have some difficulties to learn during classes, I kindly ask to express them so that I may: 1. Integrate with Basic notions; 2. Select some specific bibliographic references.
Anthropology and Psychology or Social Anthropology courses during the Undergraduate Classes attended may have provided a useful framework for the course.

TITLE: POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF BODY AND SUFFERING

According to the learning objective of the Master in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, aimed at providing a basic preparation in the anthropological discipline and its main thematic fields, the course Anthropology of body, illness, and violence offers, in the first part, an introductory overview of  Medical Anthropology by illustrating its theoretical foundations, its current development, as well as its  applications.

The second part will explore ethnographic cases and specific issues (illness and cultural processes; therapeutic effectiveness and non Western medical systems; symbolic economies of body; political, structural, and private violence; effects of torture and traumatic memory; medicalization and pathologization of social suffering; politics of diagnosis, and so on).

The aim is to develop the students’ critical awareness and autonomy of judgment on Medical Anthropology discipline and related issues.

The students have to demonstrate the possession of a specific lexicon  (illness, disease, sickness, semantic network, symbolic effectiveness, symbolic violence, reification of disease, epistemic violence, diagnostic proliferation, and so on), the ability to critically analyze and discuss ethnographic cases presented in class and implementing meaningful comparison between them.

Lectures - in Italian.

The exam will be only oral and the evaluation will be expressed on a 30 basis (18 will be considered sufficient and 30 will be the highest grade). Students are kindly invited to register  online, before coming the day of the exam. They have to present the programme they have studied, and will be called according to the order of enrolment. 
If the number of students will be too high to make impossible to end in just one day , the Professor will inform when the exam will take place and where (usually in the following days). If necessary, only for urgent health or work reasons, students may inform the Professor by email one ore two days before the exam.The answers will be evaluated according to the following criteria: a) Appropriateness in the use of Medico-Anthropological lexicon; b) Clearness of language, speech consistency and sector-based vocabulary; c) Critical-analytical capacity and ability to give examples. Questions will address both the notions acquired while attending the course, and the texts each student selects upon previous agreement with the teacher.

Erasmus students can speak in English, Spanish or French during the exam and prepare their exam on books in one of these languages on the basis of previous agreements with the teacher.

Optional activities  will give to students the opportunity of specific tutorship when requested and the opportunity to discuss in group with teacher some particular issues treated during the course

The course will provide students with an overview of the main authors, themes, and theories that have characterizedmedical anthropology. Particular attention will be devoted to the way medical knowledge contributes to shape experience, as well as bodies, desire, subjectivities (Foucault, colonial medicine, and so on).

The field of critical applied medical anthropology will receive particular emphasis (the social production of suffering; the concept of embodiment; postcolonial suffering; and so on) . The second part of the course will privilege specific issues:

1) the diagnostic proliferation in psychiatry, the PTSD hegemony against the background of an increasing de-historicization of suffering;

2) The politics of memory and oblivion; political (torture),  symbolic, epistemological, institutional, and private violence;

3) The epistemological challenge of other paradigms of disease, healing and effectiveness (folk and traditional medicines; therapeutic rituals; religious
dimensions of healing;  trivialization of the miracle; the concept of "institutional de-historification" (de Martino); etc.;

4) the political profiles of illness and healing (Scheper-Hughes research in brasil; Briggs and Martini-Briggs in Venezuela; the pathologicazion of immigration: the English case; gender issues; body and the construction of modern state: the Israeli case)

Students have to study two books among those here suggested (eventually adopting the English, French or Spanish version), and three articles among those made available by the teacher ("didactic material") on the site.

1. R. Beneduce, Archeologie del trauma. Un’antropologia del sottosuolo, Roma-Bari, Laterza

2. 4. A. Young, The Harmony of Illusions. Inventing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Princeton University Press.
3. C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma. Exploration in Memory, The John Hopkins University Press.

4. N. Rose, La politiche della vita, Einaudi.

5. E. Scarry, La sofferenza del corpo. La distruzione e la costruzione del mondo, Il Mulino.
6. M. Taussig, Shamanism, Terror, an the Wild Man: A Study in Terror an Healing, Univ. of Chicago Press.
7. A. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Pan Macmillan.
8. I. Pappé, La pulizia etnica della Palestina, Roma, Fazi editore
9. L. H. Malkki, Purity and Exile. Violence Memory and National Cosmology among the Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, Chicago, Univ.of Chicago Press.

10.  N. Rose Hunt, A colonial Lexicon, Duke University Press
11. R. Beneduce, Etnopsichiatria. Sofferenza mentale e alterità fra Storia, dominio e cultura. Roma, Carocci.
12. A. Petryna, Exposed Life. Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

13. E. De Martino, La terra del rimorso, Milano, Il Saggiatore.
14. E. De Martino, Il mondo magico, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri.
15. E. De Martino, Sud e magia, Milano, Feltrinelli.
16. H. G. West. Kulipikula, Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
17. R. Beneduce, E. Roudinesco (a cura di), Antropologia della cura, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri.

18. R. Beneduce, Un lugar en el mundo. Senderos de la migración entre violencia, memoria y deseo, Ciudad de Mexico, ENAH y UTA.

19. J. Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire, Berkeley, University of California Press.

20. C. Severi, la memoria rituale, Firenze, La nuova Italia.

21. N. Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping. The Violence of Everyday in Brazil, Berkeley, University of California Press.

22. C. Briggs, C. Martini-Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare, Berkeley, University of California Press.

23. N. Gibson, R. Beneduce, Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics. Rowman & Littlefield

Students are strongly encouraged to discuss materials and issues during the classes. Some documentary films will be used in order to promote
debates and analysis about the issues taken in consideration during the course. Erasmus students can speak and put questions in English, French or Spanish