Body, Economy, and Medicine

ANTHRO 1943 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

How do economic, social, and political systems enter, shape, and use up bodies? And what in bodies resists them? This seminar reads the anthropology of the body and medicine alongside the critique of political economy.

We begin with Marx and Engels, who described capitalism as a system that consumes the bodies and vital energies of workers. We then trace how anthropologists and social theorists have approached embodiment, from Mauss’s techniques of the body and Bourdieu’s habitus to Foucault’s biopolitics and critical medical anthropology. Along the way we ask how labor, health, and value are measured, governed, and lived, and how people come to manage their own bodies in the name of earning a living, productivity, efficiency, and wellness.

The second half turns to medicine, commodified tissues and organs, pharmaceuticals, disability, workplace injury, extractive industry, and disaster. We close with what exceeds calculation: surplus energy and expenditure, pleasure, rest, and refusal. Throughout, students practice reading social theory against ethnography and develop an original research paper.