Society for Medical Anthropology

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 disciplinaryPh.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/.

Medical Anthropology Faculty at the University of Michigan

• Gregory V. Button is an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. With a PhD in Medical Anthropology from Brandeis University, his research interests include communities in crisis, the media coverage of public health issues, and Native American health. He has conducted extensive research in the United States and Europe on the impact of disasters on local communities. Dr. Button is currently conducting research on the long-term impact of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill on Alaska native communities. Additional research includes the cultural and historical formation of bioterrorism policy. He has been a consultant to the CDC, U.S. EPA, the U. S. Senate, the State of Michigan, the Kellogg Foundation, and numerous NGOs. As a former Congressional Fellow he served as a health policy analyst in the United States Senate for the late Senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.). As a member of Sen. Wellstone’s staff, he worked on a number of health issues, including the restructuring of FEMA, the 1993 floods in the Midwest, the Hanta virus outbreak, and Native American health. Prior to his career in academia, he was a producer and reporter for public radio. As a journalist, he covered a number of stories on natural and man-made disasters, as well as environmental health issues.
• Amal Hassan Fadlalla is an Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She received an MA in Anthropology from the University of Khartoum in 1992 and a PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University in 2000. She also received certificates in Gender Studies and African Studies from Northwestern University in 2001 and a certificate of training in population, health and development, as part of the David Bell MacArthur Fellowship Program at the Harvard Center for Population and Development, School of Public Health, in 2001-2002. Dr. Fadlalla’s academic interests encompass cultural anthropology, gender studies, medical anthropology, and anthropological demography, particularly analyses of fertility, health, identity, and development, and the situation of such analyses in gender dynamics, social inequalities, cultural worldviews, and local and global political economies (Africa and the Middle East). She has recently completed a book on Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration among the Hadendowa women of eastern Sudan, where she focuses on how perceptions of danger and disease underlie women’s explanations of fertility, infertility, and social well-being. Her future research will focus on the questions of fertility, health, and marginality among Sudanese in the diaspora and at home.
• Gillian Feeley-Harnik is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her areas of ethnographic and archival research include Madagascar (since 1971) and the United States (since 1994) and Great Britain (since 1998). She is also interested in the history and anthropology of the Bible and biblically inspired religions in the Jewish and Christian diasporas and beyond. Her research in these areas has been published in several articles and books, including A Green Estate: Restoring Independence in Madagascar (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), The Lord's Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2cd ed., 1994), and a third book in progress, The Ethnography of Creation: A Comparative Study of Charles Darwin and Lewis Henry Morgan, based on archival research. Morgan, Darwin's American contemporary, was the founder of the comparative study of kinship, and through kinship, the founder of anthropology in the U.S. Both Darwin and Morgan argued that "descent is the hidden bond of connection" linking all forms of life (Darwin's words). Both drew on biblical language to articulate social, biological, and moral concerns they hoped to resolve through science. The goal of the research is to illuminate how people grasp the "mystery of life" in their everyday social practices, in reckoning who is kin to them, how they are connected to other creatures living and dead, and to the places where they live, and how popular practices of kinship and ecology in 19th- century Great Britain and America contributed to the life sciences of biology and anthropology. Her research and teaching interests include social-cultural anthropology, religion, political ecology, kinship, gender, and history of the life sciences.
• A. Roberto Frisancho is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Anthropology and Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan. Past president of the American Human Biology Council and a four-time recipient of the Excellence in Education Award at the University of Michigan, he is a specialist in biocultural anthropology, with research interests in human nutrition, genetics, adaptive physiology and human ecology, epidemiology, and kinesiology. He has conducted field research projects around the world, and particularly in Latin America, on such topics as: the role of maternal nutritional status in prenatal growth; the developmental and nutritional determinants of pregnancy outcome among teenagers; biological and environmental determinants of hypertension among African-Americans; the effects of smoking on prenatal growth; the influence of lead levels on linear growth of Mexican-American children; the developmental components of respiratory adaptation to high altitude hypoxia; and issues of undernutrition and obesity. The author of more than 100 articles, he has two books forthcoming on Nutrition and Evolution and Anthropometry for the Evaluation of Nutritional Status.
• Nancy Rose Hunt is Associate Professor in History and Obstetrics/Gynecology at the University of Michigan. She is a specialist on women’s health in Africa. Her prize-winning book, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo, is a historical ethnography of childbirth and reproductive practice in the Congo in the twentieth century. She is currently working on projects related to women’s health in the city of Accra (Ghana); the history of STDs and infertility in the Congo; and a comparative study of eclampsia in Africa and the U.S. South. She regularly teaches courses on global women’s health; health and illness in African worlds; and African social and cultural history; and she has done graduate seminars on the global politics of reproduction and the comparative study of colonial medicine.
• Holly Peters-Golden is a Lecturer III in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, before coming to Michigan in 1984 as a faculty member in the Integrated Medical-Premedical Program. With a joint appointment in the Residential College and the Institute for Social Research, she introduces anthropology into the premedical and medical school curriculum, while conducting ethnographic research with breast cancer patients. In addition, she has served as a liaison between the social sciences and medical campus as a Senior Founding Faculty Fellow in the Program for Society and Medicine, a Senior Faculty Associate in the Michigan Forum on Health Care Reform, a Senior Faculty Associate in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, and a member of the Medical Ethics board at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital. From 1992-1994, she served as the Lyle C. Roll Scholar for Humane Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine.In the Department of Anthropology, she teaches Introduction to Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and an honor’s seminar in Culture and Medicine. She serves on the departmental committee to address the integration of medical anthropology into the University’s new Life Sciences Initiative, and is an advisor to the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Research Center. She has published work on stigma and social roles, physician-patient communication, breast cancer, and has authored an undergraduate Case Studies textbook. Her current research interests include illness narratives, science studies, the construction of self and personhood in illness; the production of medical knowledge; risk; explanatory models of illness, and social construction of disease.
• Elisha P. Renne is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Dr. Renne earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University in 1990. From 1991 to1993, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Australia National University, Canberra, where she collaborated with demographers on a project studying fertility change and reproductive health in southwestern Nigeria. She has also taught at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, and at Princeton University before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 1998. At Michigan, she has conducted graduate seminars on contemporary African societies and demographic anthropology, and undergraduate courses on introductory anthropology, the anthropology of childbirth, and African women. Dr. Renne’s research in Nigeria focuses on her continuing interest in reproductive health, gender relations, and Islamic education. Her current project is a National Science Foundation-funded study of Hausa women’s Islamic education in Zaria, Nigeria. Recently, she completed of a book on Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town (University of Michigan, 2003). She is also the co-editor of the volume, Regulating Menstruation (University of Chicago Press, 2001), the volume, Population and Development Issues (African BookBuilders Ltd., Ibadan, 2000), and a special edition of the journal, Africa Today (“Sexuality and Generational Identities in Sub-Saharan Africa,” 2000).
• Elizabeth Roberts is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She received her PhD (2006) from the joint program in Medical Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley- UC San Francisco. Her general interests include the critical study of medicine and science, social theory, modernity, gender, race, religion and Latin America. To date, the bulk of her research concerns the comparative exploration of the categories of religion, kinship, and "life", which manifest through the globalization of biomedical technologies. Dr. Roberts is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Equatorial In-Vitro: Reproductive Medicine and Modernity in Ecuador," based on her ethnographic analysis of in-vitro fertilization clinics in urban Ecuador. For this project she examined what IVF in Ecuador reveals about this global, person-making technology, and the dynamics of contemporary social life in the Andes. The research has generated a number of publications, among them "Extra embryos: Ethics, cryopreservation and IVF in Ecuador and elsewhere." American Ethnologist, 2007 -34 (1), and "God's Laboratory: Religious Rationalities and Modernity in Ecuadorian In-Vitro Fertilization." Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 2006 - 30(4). Future projects include the investigation of the burgeoning international demand for extracted human eggs for stem cell research, and a study of medical migration and medical tourism. In addition, Dr. Roberts has a long-standing interest in the practice and theory of ethnographic methods especially in regards to methods that address the complexities of contemporary global processes.
• Jennifer Robertson is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She also has an appointment as Professor of Women's Studies and is a faculty associate in the Anthropology/History Program. Robertson earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University in 1985; she was an Invited Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1996-97) where she began her current research on the history and present-day ramifications of eugenics and “blood” ideology in Japan and Israel. Robertson is the originator and General Editor of Colonialisms, a new book series from the University of California Press that aims to explore the historical realities, current significance, and future ramifications of imperialist practices with origins and boundaries outside of “the West,” including transnational corporations (e.g., oil and pharmaceutical companies and hospitals), NGOs and cyberspace (www.ucpress.edu/books/COL.ser.html). Robertson is currently writing and editingarticles and books on the cultural history of Japanese eugenic colonialism, eugenics and bioethics in Japan today, and the genre of war art. The liaison between Anthropology and the Life Sciences Values and Society Program (LSVSP), she has created a new undergraduate course for Fall 2004, Anthro 232 Genes, Genealogies and Identities, and is collaborating with Dr. Michael Fetters on a future project that explores the limits of “culture” in two much mystified illnesses in Japan: atopy (atopic dermatitis) and depression. Two new medical anthropology courses she is preparing are International Bioethics and Wellness and Illness in East Asia. The author of five books— Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City (UC Press, 1991 & 1994); Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (UC Press, 1998; 2nd ptg. 1999; 3rd ptg. 2001, 1999 Kurt Weill Prize, 1998 Ruth Benedict Prize); Odoru teikokushugi: Takarazuka ni miru kindai Nihon no sei to bunka no shokuminchifu (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 2000); Editor, Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell 2004); and (forthcoming) Editor, A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (Blackwell 2004)—her book-in-progress, Blood and Beauty: Eugenic Modernity and Empire in Japan (UC Press), focuses on the colonial history and present circumstances of eugenics, public hygiene, “blood” ideology and bioethics in Japan/East Asia. With respect to medical anthropology, she has published and lectured widely on the topic of suicide, sexuality, eugenics and eugenic modernity,“blood” ideology, social and “race” hygiene, and bioethics past and present.
• Miriam Ticktin is Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Anthropology, with her appointment supported by the International Institute. She received an M.Phil in English from Oxford University, a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology done in "co-tutelle" with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in France. She is currently working on her book manuscript, “Between Justice and Compassion: ‘Les Sans Papiers’ and the Political Economy of Health, Human Rights and Humanitarianism in France,” as well as conducting research on the relationship between medical humanitarianism, health and immigration in the United States, to put in comparative perspective with her research in France. Her research and teaching interests include human rights and social justice; the political economy of gender and health; the anthropology of medicine, health and social suffering; anthropology of ethics; transnational feminisms and feminist theory; and immigration and “the new racisms” in Europe.