Master 2025/2026

Introduction to Medical Anthropology in Development

Type: Compulsory course (Population and Development)

Delivered by: Department of Demography

When: 2 year, 2 module

Open to: everyone

Instructors: Ilya Ermolin

Language: English

Course Syllabus

Abstract

The course will introduce a broad range of medical anthropology topics, theoretical approaches and research techniques by examining case studies. Initially I will introduce the frameworks of general anthropology for those for whom anthropology is well unknown discipline. We will use the concepts of culture, risk and resilience as starting points for follow-up discussion in which we will investigate how cultural forces shape issues of health, illness, pandemic and medicine, how the production of specific knowledge shapes perception of health and illness as individual experience through the language and meaning. We will also discuss the field-based methods used by medical anthropologists – and ethnographers in particular – to study illness experience and medical practice in Russia and other countries. Examples of questions include: What is health in anthropology? What are the types of resilience highlighted in medical anthropology (epidemiology), and what is the difference between those types? How are risk and resilience connected to health (including mental health) and disease and how can this connection be studied in the field? How do local cultural practices shape aspects of illness, sex and death? Do you think risks carried challenges that were not appropriately taken into account by the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)? Topics to be covered in the course:•Introduction to Medical Anthropology •Medical Anthropology or Epidemiology?•The dilemmas of Сulture and Health•Cognitive Medical Anthropology•Risk, vulnerability, and resilience as pivotal conceptual frameworks •Methods needed to study the link between culture and healthA particular time will be devoted to studying the methods of field study and further concepts of data analysis. We will pay attention to the following methods: free-listing, pile-sorting, cultural consensus analysis, participant observation, ethnographic interviews. Separately we will take Q-sort methodology during the lecture. The methods are supposed to be used while conducting and then writing the research analytical note.