Mental Health, Psychiatry, and Culture

ANTH 390

Mental Health, Psychiatry, and Culture

(CHUA, FALL 2017)

Even as mental illness is now increasingly framed in neurological terms and as a global health concern, anthropological and other social science perspectives suggest that psychiatric diagnosis is deeply contingent, and that mental illness experiences are richly variable and cultural in nature. This special topics course in medical anthropology explores mental illness as subjective experience, social process, key cultural symbol, and object of intervention and expert knowledge. Our questions include: Does mental illness vary across cultural and social settings? How do psychiatric ways of diagnosing and treating mental illness shape people’s subjective experience of their affliction? What does this contingency mean for the movement for global mental health? We consider these and other questions in light of the emergent realities of contemporary life that medical anthropologists endeavor to make sense of: expanding pharmaceutical markets, new therapeutic technologies, humanitarian interventionism, and shifting forms of subjectivity in our globalizing world.

ANTH 390

Health and Medicine in the American South

(KING, FALL 2017)

The American South is experienced and imagined in a multitude of ways. Everyday lives in the South are continuously borne out by this region's oral history, literature, music, food, art, and material culture. Drawing from these sources, this course will focus on how Southern bodies have experienced health and illness. We will pose the questions: How can we understand the history and culture of a region through the experience of health and healthcare among its people? Using the approaches of anthropology, we will consider the individual, social, and political dimensions of medicalized bodies in the American South starting with indigenous and slave histories up to the current-day.

ANTH 290, Hip Hop Roots: The Politics and Passions of Black Oral Poetry

Glenn Hinson

TuTh, 9:30-10:45 am

When hip hop first exploded onto the American scene in the 1970s, Black elders across the country were strident in their denial of its novelty. “There’s nothing new about rapping,” they claimed. “We've been doing that for years.” This “new” form, they asserted, was just a skilled re-working of oral poetries that had been around for generations. To make matters even more complicated, each elder seemed to point to a different ancestral form—some to the wordplay of rhyming radio deejays, others to the bawdy flow of streetcorner poets, still others to the rhymed storytelling of sanctified singers. And each was right; elegant rhyming has marked African American talk for generations. Yet because most such rhyming was spoken, its history has remained largely hidden. In this class, we’ll unpack this lost history, talking to poets and emcees, listening to old recordings, and probing the archives to uncover a hidden heritage of African American eloquence. Our goal is nothing short of writing the prehistory of hip hop, by demonstrating oral poetry’s longstanding role as a key marker of African American identity, and as a critical voice of cultural affirmation and political dissent.

The written histories of hip hop, of course, point to some moments in this history. But they tend to do so only in passing, mentioning one or two forms, and then inevitably leaping backwards to the masterful praise-songs of West Africa’s griots. Yet the hundreds of years between the griot’s song and the emcee’s flow is far more complicated than these histories would suggest. In this course, we’ll explore these complications, conducting original research to craft an historical (and contemporary) ecology of Black poetic performance.

This class isn’t about contemporary hip hop, or even hip hop since the 1970s; instead, it’s about the Black poetic streams that gave rise to hip hop, dating back to the 1600s. As such, it challenges us to do what might be called a poetic archaeology of hip hop, where our focus is on artful words instead of artifacts. In doing this work, please be forewarned: this isn’t research that’s ever been done before. As with archaeology, we’ll be exploring new territory. Don’t be surprised, though, to discover that some of the same themes that frame hip hop today—especially in terms of the politics of Blackness, and the explicit challenge of racist practice—are everywhere apparent. Black oral poetry—whether proclaimed by enslaved wordsmiths in the early 1800s or by hip hop emcees today—has always been a voice of struggle . . . and of affirmation.