| Course ID: | ANTH 4590/6590. 3 hours. |
| Course Title: | Anthropology of Infectious Disease |
Course
Description: | The role of disease in the human experience. Students will draw on information from medical anthropology, epidemiology, human adaptation, disease ecology, and evolutionary biology to examine how diseases have been shaped by human-environmental interactions, culture, individual behavior, and social and economic processes. |
| Oasis Title: | Anth of Infectious Disease |
| Prerequisite: | ANTH 1102 or ANTH 1102E or BIOL 1104 or BIOL 1108 |
Semester Course
Offered: | Offered every even-numbered year. |
| Grading System: | A-F (Traditional) |
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| Course Objectives: | Throughout the course, the student will be expected to:
• Articulate the relevance of anthropological approaches including evolutionary, ecological, and biocultural models to understand human disease.
• Persuasively discuss at least one example of scholarship about the connection between factors such as environmental change, technology, economic factors, or diet and behavior and human disease patterns.
• Demonstrate the ability to read and synthesize academic and popular scholarship from different disciplines on biocultural, ecological, and evolutionary explanations of human disease. |
| Topical Outline: | I. Fundamentals
How does anthropology study health and disease?
Theoretical approaches: Evolution and adaptation, life history theory, and the political ecology of health
Conservation and biodiversity
II. Evolution and adaptation
Disease in prehistory: Agriculture
History and global pandemics
Disease and behavior in a globally connected world
Evolutionary medicine
III. Contemporary disease ecology
Political-economy of disease
Syndemics
Multispecies interactions and global change
Lifestyle disease
Environmental pollution and toxins
Recent global pandemics |