Academic Resources: graduate programs
Medical Anthropology at the University of Michigan
The Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor is the top-ranked department in the country, according to the U.S. News and World Report. Thus, medical anthropology at UM-Ann Arbor exists within a premiere anthropology training program featuring a four-fields approach. More than a dozen UM-Ann Arbor faculty members have primary or secondary research and teaching interests in medical anthropology. Most are situated within the field of cultural anthropology (ethnology); however, several faculty members in physical anthropology maintain biocultural medical anthropology interests. Several of the medical anthropology faculty members have joint appointments in other departments and schools, including Women’s Studies, History, Sociology, Public Health, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Center for Human Growth and Development, Natural Resources, Center for Afro-American and African Studies, Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Furthermore, these faculty members offer particularly strong area studies training in health and illness issues in Africa and the Middle East (Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, and Syria), in addition to the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Together, UM-Ann Arbor faculty members offer coursework and training in five distinct areas of medical anthropology as follows:
- Gender and Health: Through ethnographic engagement in women’s lives, the medical anthropologists at UM-Ann Arbor have contributed considerably to theoretical debates surrounding gender and health, including issues of embodiment, agency, identity, suffering, and resistance to (dis)ease-producing social relations and conditions. UM-Ann Arbor faculty specialize in the broad area of gender and health, in both their research and teaching. Topics highlighted in their work include the social construction and “disciplining” of the female body; women’s changing health needs through the life cycle; women as reproducers in the West and across various global sites; the biologization, medicalization, and technologization of women’s health; the health-demoting effects of racism, poverty, and patriarchy; the effects of inhumane conditions of labor on women’s lives; and ultimately, how women narrativize and make meaning of their suffering. In addition, men’s health and masculinity studies are increasingly emphasized in UM faculty members’ research and coursework. Several UM-Ann Arbor faculty are widely recognized for their work in gender and health and have won major prizes, including the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker Prize for Outstanding Research on Gender and Health. Infertility and other reproductive “disruptions” are a special area of focus for four faculty members, who participate in a monthly Study Group on Adoption, Infertility, and Gender sponsored by UM’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. This IRWG Study Group is open to both graduate students and faculty. It is currently involved in sponsoring a May 2005 international conference on “Reproductive Disruptions: Childlessness, Adoption, and Other Reproductive Complexities,” at which many medical anthropologists specializing in reproduction will be in attendance.
- Medical Anthropology and History: The University of Michigan has a unique Joint Ph.D. Program in Anthropology and History, which has attracted many Ph.D. students wishing to combine anthropological and historical methods in their work on medicine, health, and the body, especially in contexts of colonial and post-World War II humanitarian aid and development. Furthermore, several faculty members are interested in the history of comparative medical systems, including both ethnomedicine and biomedicine in pre- and post-colonial settings around the world. In addition to the medical anthropologists already mentioned here, a strong and diverse group of medical historians, including John Carson, Joel Howell, Nancy Hunt, Michael MacDonald, Howard Markell, Jonathan Metzl, Michelle Mitchell, Gina Morantz-Sanchez, Martin Pernick, and Alexandra Stern, has affiliations with various units on campus, including this Joint Ph.D. Program, American Culture, and the History Department. Also of note is the new Science and Technology Studies program (see below), which includes a graduate certificate, and is increasingly providing a science studies framework for graduate students pursuing Ph.D. work on the social, cultural, and historical study of medicine.
- Global Public Health: Through research and training projects conducted in international settings, several UM-Ann Arbor faculty members specialize in issues of global public health and teach courses of this nature in the UM School of Public Health. Topics highlighted in their research and teaching include the history and critique of the major international health agencies and their development paradigms; the political economy and ecology of health, including infectious disease; child survival and women’s reproductive health; and men’s health under “modernization.” Students who take courses in this area learn about a) medical anthropology in global public health (i.e., the principles, methods, and approaches of applied medical anthropology in international health settings, including public health educational interventions and disease control programs); b) medical anthropology of global public health (i.e., the ways in which medical anthropologists attempt to understand global health problems in a larger cultural, historical, ecological, and political-economic context); and c) medical anthropological critiques of global public health (i.e., the ways in which medical anthropologists have critically analyzed notions of health “development” and have pointed out the challenges of developing effective, long-term public health interventions for many of the most serious global health problems). Medical anthropology students at UM are encouraged to seek global public health training, through student-initiated dual-degree enrollment (PhD-MPH) in UM’s School of Public Health (UM-SPH). In Fall 2003, UM-SPH initiated a Global Health Interdepartmental Concentration, which provides specialty training in global health to interested students who are pursuing MPH degrees in any of SPH’s departments. UM-SPH already offers a Reproductive and Women’s Health Interdepartmental Concentration of this nature. One UM medical anthropology faculty member, Marcia Inhorn, is jointly appointed in Anthropology and SPH through the Department of Health Behavior and Education (HBHE), thereby providing a critical link for medical anthropology students interested in dual-degree training in global public health.
- Science & Technology Studies (STS): STS exists at UM-Ann Arbor as a small but vibrant lecture series with a recently approved undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate program. It is hoped that the area will grow substantially over the next few years, with UM medical anthropologists adding greatly to that effort. The STS lecture series has recently included a number of speakers jointly sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), who have addressed gender and medicine, mostly in a historical idiom. The program receives financing from the International Institute, which should encourage a transnational focus in years to come. UM medical anthropologists offer the possibility of integrating contemporary, ethnographic and transnational studies of medical practice into the program. There should also be opportunities for involvement in the multi-campus expansion of the Life Sciences, Values, and Society Initiative. Medical anthropology STS students will have the opportunity to take classes from several disciplinary bases that together ask such questions as: How does scientific and medical knowledge, about such things as genetics, gender, sexuality, race and disease, stratify and constrain the life chances of individuals? Why are more and more areas of private and public lives being medicalized? What is bioethics, what does it replace, and why has it become part of the medical establishment? How are truth and efficacy in medicine established? Does the corporate sponsorship of medical experimentation promote health and accountability? What are the connections between bioweapons and the medical establishment? Is scientific or medical knowledge political, and if so, in what ways? Faculty in this area focus on the relationship between ethics, social justice, and medicine, including the relationship between human rights and health. Several faculty are concerned with the intersection of law and medicine, including the intellectual property right debates surrounding pharmaceuticals. Another major area of concern involves local moral systems, particularly moral responses to the introduction of global biotechnologies on the local level.
- Biocultural Medical Anthropology: The University of Michigan has several physical anthropology faculty who focus on biocultural issues of interest to medical anthropology. Particular strengths exist in nutritional anthropology, including understanding the ways in which diverse food preferences among humans are population specific. Faculty attempt to determine the extent to which cultural food preferences are related to genetic factors. For example, avoidance of dairy products in some populations and among some individuals is related to genetic differences in the activity of lactase. Some populations have evolved cultural adaptations to overcome this genetic difference and thus still consume dairy products. Similarly, it is unknown whether the extent to which humans avoid bitter foods is related to genetic differences in the ability to taste bitter biochemical traits. Biocultural anthropologists at the University of Michigan attempt to understand this dynamic interaction between cultural and biological factors with respect to individual and population differences in food preference and avoidance.
Given these five diverse areas of concentration and faculty research interests, graduate students at the University of Michigan who focus on medical anthropological topics work with an array of faculty members, often on a very interdisciplinary basis. Students may form graduate committees with members from more than one department. Furthermore, cross-campus affiliations with medical anthropologists at Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and University of Michigan-Dearborn, allow University of Michigan medical anthropology students to take up to nine credit hours of courses at these affiliated campuses. Within the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, medical anthropology students are encouraged to partake in dual-degree programs. For example, several doctoral students are in the Anthropology and History program, while others are in the Anthropology and Social Work program. Students are also able to receive master’s degree training at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
Of the fifteen current UM doctoral students focusing in medical anthropology, their projects are of their own choosing and are located in a wide range of global sites. Some examples include: the legacy of colonial medicine (and particularly Rockefeller hygiene projects) in rural Java, Indonesia; the impact of state-sponsored family planning on notions of national identity in Trinidad and Tobago; efforts by pregnant American middle-class women’s to produce “quality” children through a variety of pregnancy rituals and technologies; the history of the Cuban eugenics movement and its effects on Cuban gender identity and sexuality; doctor-patient discourse during biomedicalized birth in Mayan Guatemala; and the role of HIV/AIDS non-profit service organizations in prevention efforts in New York City and Amsterdam.
Courses in Medical Anthropology Currently Offered:
Medical Anthropology Theory and Practice (Faculty)
Communities in Crisis (Button)
Media Advocacy and Public Health (Button)
Media Coverage of Public Health Issues (Button)
Bioterrorism: Community Preparation and Response (Button)
Native American Health (Button)
Global Perspectives on Gender, Health, and Reproduction (Fadlalla)
Gender, Poverty, and Medicine (Fadlalla)
Anthropology of Kinship (Feeley-Harnik)
Nutrition and Evolution (Frisancho)
Human Adaptation (Frisancho)
Nutritional Anthropometry (Frisancho)
Health and Illness in African Worlds (Hunt)
Global Women’s Health (Hunt)
Gender and Health: Ethnographic Perspectives (Inhorn)
Intersectionality and Women’s Health: Ethnographic Approaches to Race, Class, Gender, and “Difference” (Inhorn)
Global Health: Anthropological Perspectives (Inhorn)
Qualitative Methods and Proposal Writing (Inhorn)
Culture and Medicine (Peters-Golden)
Medical Anthropology (Peters-Golden)
Culture and Childbirth(Renne)
Demographic Approaches in Anthropology (Renne with Tom Fricke)
Maternal Health and Environmental Pollution in Africa (Renne)
Genes, Genealogies, Identities: Anthropological Perspectives (Robertson)
Politics and Practice of Ethnography (Robertson) Health and Wellness in East Asia (Robertson) Political Economy of Gender and Health (Ticktin) Health and Human Rights (Ticktin)
The Politics of Suffering (Ticktin)
Anthropology of Science and Ethics (Ticktin)
Graduate Study in Science, Technology, and Society
The program in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Michigan solicits applications from students wishing to pursue a Ph.D. with specialization in STS, the history or anthropology of medicine, or related fields.
UM's STS program offers a wide range of perspectives on the reciprocal role of science, technology, and medicine in shaping societies, cultures, and politics. Geographical strengths include Africa, the Middle East, North America, and Western Europe. Topical strengths include: * Colonial, transnational, and global dynamics in the practice of technology, science, and medicine
* Historical and anthropological perspectives on bodies, health, genetics, and environment * Politics and culture of information systems * Life sciences and their social implications * Cultural meanings of science, technology, and medicine
The University of Michigan encourages scholars routinely to move across traditional academic boundaries. In order to balance
disciplinary training and accreditation with interdisciplinary research, the STS certificate is offered in conjunction with disciplinary
Ph.D. programs. Candidates should therefore apply to departments for admission. The program particularly encourages applications to the departments of History, Anthropology, American Culture, and Sociology, and to the schools of Information and Public Health.
For more information about the program and its faculty, please consult our web site: http://www.umich.edu/~umsts/.