Students in Anthropology 393: Health and Healing , taught at the University of Alberta, took on a fun assignment in the winter of 2014: listen to podcasts of the CBC radio program White Coat, Black Art, by Dr. Brian Goldman, then write an analytic essay. Their goal was to take take real-world, contemporary medical experiences or situations that they heard about in the radio episodes, analyse what was said in relation to the anthropological literature, and translate what they learned into an essay that critically reflected upon what they had heard.
Key resources were articles in the classic anthology edited by Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock, called Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life (1993, University of California Press), and three contemporary medical ethnographies: Matthew Gutmann's Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDs in Mexico. (2007 University of California Press), Katherine Lepani's Islands of Love, Islands of Risk: Culture and HIV in the Trobriands (2012: Vanderbilt U Press) and another classic, now out in an updated second edition, Shirley Lindenbaum's Kuru Sorcery; Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands (2013, Paradigm Publishers).
Part of the students' challenge was to write in a way that made anthropological perspectives understandable to a non-anthropological audience, and explore the relevance of the anthropological perspectives and lessons learned from other societies and cultures, to Canadians. I think their work meets and goes beyond that goal. A report from a subcommittee of the Committee on Learning Environment here at U Alberta recently emphasized seven attributes of the learning environment. The undergraduates' essays demonstrate at least six of the seven: communication, confidence, creativity, critical thinking, ethical responsibility, as well as scholarship (as they wrote individually, the seventh attribute -collaboration- is not really demonstrated in this particular exercise).
The subsequent blog posts show young university students doing exactly what undergraduates are supposed to do: struggle to think outside their comfort zone, apply new perspectives to common experiences, think big thoughts, learn about things they never even knew existed, and then reflect on them. Please: Read, Enjoy, Appreciate.
Please click here to visit the blog and read the student essays