RELI 86 – Fall 2016 This paper functions as your final. Paper copy. 30%
This paper is intended to pull together the entire course by engaging you in an exercise in medical pluralism. Your task is to move sensitively, knowledgably and critically back and forth between different religio-cultural understandings of illness.
Requirements:
** 5 pages minimum (You may go over the page limit if you genuinely need the space, but you will not receive credit for quantity alone. Memoirs tend to be longer.)PLEASE NUMBER YOUR PAGES.
** In your last paper, I did not take off points for incorrect citation form (in text citation and use of quotes).[1] In this paper, you will lose points if your citation form is incorrect. Please review the comments I made on your first paper.
** Unless otherwise noted, your essay must be comparative: depending on which topic you choose, you might not have equal amounts of prose about both biomedical and Chinese systems, but you will receive your grade from your skill and facility at moving back and forth btw BOTH. Please review the notes you took from the class period in which we discussed controlled and significant comparison.
The PRO of comparison: The point of a comparative intellectual exercise like this class is to use comparison/contrast to teach yourself how to think and see and approach a topic in a NEW way. So your conclusion to your paper should address some ways that you now think about medicine (or religion and medicine) newly as a result of your paper. Your test, once again, will be: did I learn anything new?
The CON of comparison: In middle and high school, they teach you to think comparatively by coming up a whole bunch of unrelated ways that two things are the same and/or different. Such comparison has little value, for it leads to no new thinking. Between any two points, you can always draw a line. Thus, a good way to fail this paper is to structure it as a series of random and unconnected similarities and differences: in these ways, they are alike; in those ways, they are different. Such papers lack an over-all synthesizing thesis and this lack will be reflected in your grade. If you are not learning something as a result of your comparison and contrast, you are not doing this correctly.A good way to do well in this paper (and thus a good way to think comparatively), is to select ONE vantage point from which you compare and contrast your two forms of data. Some examples: their different ways of looking; different ways of relating parts or wholes; the “body” with which they engage (organs vs. organs; solid lesions vs. yin/yang); the view of life; what is most real about the world.
Your choices:
ONE. According to scholar Arthur Frank, there is something about illness that wants story or narrative. For this option, write an illness memoir. You must include two perspectives: 1) the experiences and reflections of someone who is experiencing illness and anticipating death as illness and death are approached in a biomedical context AND 2) the experiences and reflections and concerns of someone who is experiencing illness and anticipating death as they are approached in an East Asian medical context. This could be the same person – who is engaging in medical pluralism. OR, you could write two memoirs, one from each perspective. You can take the perspective of the patient, the physician, or even someone who is being trained to be a physician.
A friendly warning: This is not a creative writing course, so you do not earn your grade by your expertise in this genre. Instead, I will grade your paper by how you incorporate ideas from Foucault and Kaptchuk and Kuriyama. Thus, if you do not use direct quotes, please include parenthetical citations or footnotes – and if you opt not to do that because it jars with the flow of your memoir and seems too artificial then you MUST append a paragraph in which you explain your implicit use of sources.
TWO. I have argued that different practices generate different bodies/objects of medicine and different subjects (both physicians and patients). The point of thinking this way is to AVOID the trap of multiculturalism, which includes other people’s views as cultural differences without being able to accord them sufficient truth value to take traction in the world. (For ex: acupuncture becomes about belief and stress; cultural practices of a family refusing to tell their father his terminal diagnosis get over-ruled by ethics committees in the name of ‘patient autonomy’ – because the family’s insistence that this would have negative effects on his after-life carried no weight for them beyond a cultural peculiarity: it wasn’t real; just their perception). Write a letter to a biomedical doctor who is struggling with a patient who wants to use East Asian medicine and to whom this seems BS (they claim that the best doctors can diagnose from a phone call!). While this doctor is going to ‘let’ this patient do it – s/he can’t stop them – they are laughing at it, scorning it, uncomfortable with it, and denigrating the patient as a result.
THREE. Hate creative paper options? Write an essay comparing and contrasting biomedicine and East Asian medicine by working closely with Foucault’s and Kaptchuk’ s texts. Be sure to think about the different “disciplines” in which each is writing (after all, this is an IS course) and how this limits the arguments each can make:
** Foucault gives a historical analysis of how we in the West came to think about death and sickness in a certain way in a medical context. (He does not present his own personal views, at least not directly). Foucault uses history to give him some distance so that he can provide philosophical reflections about society, power relations, science, and the human experience of suffering.
** Kaptchuk wrote as an insider, an actual practitioner who is informed by scholarly knowledge, trying to make comprehensible a way of thinking that is strange and foreign to most of his readers.
THREE.ONE Intrigued by the above but at a loss re beginning? Write your comparison through the lens of the course’s thesis: the practice(s) of perception through which the body is approached will result in a) a different experience of the body; b) a different experience of doctor/patient interactions and c) a different way that medicine is used to govern people in society.
THREE.TWO. 2 Still interested in a traditional paper format? Try this one: In class I have argued that one way to understand medical pluralism is by analogy with religious pluralism: Just as God/the divine/ spirit/whatever is bigger than any one religion, so the human experience of life, sickness and death is bigger than any one medical system (rooted as it is in a particular and therefore limited human practice). Use this analogy to help you compare and contrast the biomedical experience of life, sickness and death with the Chinese medical experience of life and sickness (maybe death too).
FOUR. Intrigued by our class discussion on how it is that Chinese medicine does not use the notion of balance (of yin and yang) as a norm? Read some chapters from Francois Jullien, The Silent Transformations, which and then write an essay in which you compare and contrast Western and Chinese ways of seeing and saying change (and therefore suffering).
FIVE. Foucault wrote from a philosophical perspective. Read the best philosophical reflection on East Asian medicine I know – if you read it, it will change your life! Francois Jullien, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness (NY: Zone, 2007). This book is profound and deep and is best read slowly. I recommend picking 1-2 chapters on which to focus a paper. Your paper can be academic, or it can be more personal. In either case, write an essay titled roughly something like “How Ending the Search for Happiness in Favor of Feeding Your LifeCould Change Your Life.”Be sure to compare and contrast how biomedicine (using Foucault) understands life and its care with the view in Jullien.
SIX. Read the article by historian of religion Linda Barnes in which she studies how acupuncture has been psychologized in the West. Then write an essay in which you explain why this is so – drawing on Foucault (and his account of how medicine became a science) as well as Kaptchuk and Kuriyama.
Linda Barnes, ‘The Psychologizing of Chinese Healing Practices in the US,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 22 (1998): 413-443.
You can access this article by logging in to the portal and then going to the following URL
OR: going to “Journal Finder” on the Axinn web page and entering the title of the journal.
Good luck!!
[1] SOME SAMPLES:
As Foucault states, “knowledge was made for cutting” (Birth of the Clinic 54).
As Foucault says: “Knowledge was made for cutting and this is why dissection was so crucial in the birth of the clinic. The associations that we make in our language between analyzing something and autopsy are by no means accidental” (Birth of the Clinic 54).
As Foucault himself says:
Knowledge was made for cutting and this is why dissection was so crucial in the birth of the clinic. The associations that we make in our language between analyzing something and autopsy are by no means accidental. They reveal something very profound about how we as moderns understand what it is to think. For us today, anatomy provides the image of thought. (Birth of the Clinic 54-55).