Society for Medical Anthropology

Transcription

Anthropology and Gender Studies Professor. Lynn Morgan: Medical anthropology is one of those places where students really do get to question some of the most fundamental assumptions about their own beliefs. Michaela Schwartz '13: The lectures are constantly sparking my interest, and I constantly feel like I'm challenging ideas that I had previously before coming to this class. Professor Morgan: I think it's one thing to question family organization, to question economic systems, but it's quite another thing to think about our bodies, to think about what makes us sick and what makes us well. Is it disability, and if so, what's the disability? Schwartz: Professor Morgan is constantly challenging our preconceived notions, which really excites me because every day in class I come up with these new ideas that I hadn't had before. Molly Bearman '14: One of the fascinating discussions that we've had recently, in the past couple of lectures, is about amputee wannabes. Schwartz: They called it apotemnophilia, and that's basically this notion of feeling like in order to feel like a whole person and be happy with your body, these people really desire having a limb cut off. Hayat Ahmed '13: That whole concept was really, like ... what? Why would somebody want to have their arms cut off? Like, that's crazy. Student: I have full respect for people who live in a body that they don't feel like is their own, whether that's because of an eating disorder issue or because of a gender identity issue. If I recognize that way of feeling like your body isn't right for yourself, and why is this any different... I don't know, I'm just really struggling with it. Professor Morgan: OK. All right. I find that the students are very sophisticated. They're very critical of many of their assumptions and each others' assumptions. When I can foster that, that makes it the most exciting. It's not interesting if we all agree with each other. It's only interesting if we disagree. Schwartz: I don't think that my opinion was shared. I was sort of making the argument that, like, well, we say nose jobs are OK, and we say that breast implants are OK, so why not cut off a limb? Professor Morgan: And this is obviously one of the questions that medical anthropologists want to ask, is what is the role of medicine? What is the role of healers? Are they there just to cure people? Are they there to repair us when we're broken? Or are they there to help us realize a kind of body that we may feel deep inside that we want, but we can't get without the intervention of medical science? Ahmed: Disease is a way of thinking about health issues and illnesses as opposed to being this objective thing that we think about. Schwartz: I now feel like I have a totally new view on what constitutes health and disease, and how various societies create different, I guess, conversations on what it means to be healthy. Professor Morgan: I think the most fun is watching students come alive to these ideas, because a lot of them have circled around these ideas or they've wondered about these kinds of things, but they find in this class a place where they can give voice to some of the ideas that they may have thought about, that they may have wondered about, but they never really had a language, a vocabulary, a theoretical framework for understanding or articulating. And so I see a lot of students come to anthropology and say, "This is a perspective that really makes sense to me."