Medical Anthropology MSc

About the Course

• Why do some biomedical interventions seeking to control infectious and non-infectious diseases work, and others fail?
• How do ideas about ‘the body’ and ‘person’ influence the experience of health, illness and healing among different groups and societies?
• How and why is it appropriate to combine insights emerging from clinical and epidemiological research with ethnographic understandings of health, illness and disease?

Medical anthropology can be described as the study of cultural beliefs and behaviours associated with the origin, recognition and management of health and illness in different social and cultural groups.

Despite the name conventionally given to this area of study, medical anthropology is not simply concerned with practices of healing or systems of diagnosis and treatment such as biomedicine. It deals with the more informal systems of health care that exist worldwide (such as self-treatment, folk healers, shamans, traditional birth attendants, and alternative practitioners), as well as those associated with professional Western science-based medicine and caring practices.

Additionally, medical anthropology is also concerned with issues which relate to different cultural views of the 'self' in health and disease, as well as shared beliefs, images and practices associated with perceptions of the human body and mind.

The Brunel MSc addresses the above issues in a lively and challenging way. The Brunel MSc addresses medical anthropology issues in a lively and challenging way.

A number of scholarships are available to help students with their field research – further details can be found under Special Features.

Aims

It was the first taught Master's degree dedicated to medical anthropology in Europe; and it is the largest MSc medical anthropology programme in the UK.

We also have the largest number of dedicated and internationally known medical anthropology staff in the country teaching the degree; and around 350 students have graduated with an MSc in medical anthropology from Brunel University. They are now working all over the world in a variety of settings.

Enquiries

Course enquiries
Email sss-pgenquiries@brunel.ac.uk
Tel +44 (0)1895 265951

For applications already submitted
Contact Admissions online
Tel +44 (0)1895 265265

Course director: Dr Melissa Parker

Visit the Social Sciences website

Related Courses

• Psychological and Psychiatric Anthropology MSc
• Social Anthropology MRes
• Anthropology of Childhood, Youth and Education MSc
• Anthropology of International Development and Humanitarian Assistance MSc

Special Features

Cecil Helman Scholarship Fund
Set up to honour the life and work of leading light in international medical anthropology Professor Cecil Helman (1944-2009), the Doctor Cecil Helman Scholarship Fund provides fieldwork support for between two and four students on our MSc Medical Anthropology course.
Dr. Helman taught at Brunel University from 1990, and became a Professor of Social Sciences in 2005. In 2004, he was awarded the American Anthropological Association’s career achievement award, and the following year he won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Lucy Mair medal.
As well as leading the way in Medical Anthropology, Dr. Helman exercised his artistic talents through his paintings, poems, fables, and short fiction – all of which revolved around a theme of the human side of medicine and the narratives that surrounded the doctor-patient relationship.
Scholarship
The Cecil Helman Scholarship Fund offers between two and four students up to £1,000 to help them to complete field research for their dissertations.
Selection
The scholarship will be awarded to MSc Medical Anthropology students who demonstrate excellent academic performance and the ability to undertake an original field research project.

Internationally respected staff

The MSc in Medical Anthropology is taught by a large team of internationally respected medical anthropologists who have undertaken extensive fieldwork at home and overseas.

Research interests of our current team of internationally respected anthropologists are as follows:

Dr Nicolas Argenti has undertaken long-term fieldwork in Cameroon and in Sri Lanka. He is an expert on children’s and young people’s experience of conflict and on theories of child play, embodiment, and collective memory.

Dr Andrew Beatty specialises in religion, kinship and emotion. He has worked on the relation between family forms and styles of thinking (conceptual and moral relativism) in Java, has a research interest in Mexico and has published on the anthropology of emotion.

Dr Peggy Froerer has conducted extensive field research in India. She is an expert on the anthropology of childhood, education and schooling, and is interested in theories of learning and cognition. Her earlier work focused on Hindu nationalism and Christian/Hindu ethnic relations. She is currently working on a monograph on education and social mobility in central India.

Dr Eric Hirsch has a long-standing interest in the ethnography and history of Papua New Guinea. His research focuses on issues of historicity, landscape, power and property relations. He has also carried out fieldwork in Britain on the relations between new technologies and personhood.

Dr Isak Niehaus works on the diverse fields of population removals, cosmology, witchcraft, masculinity, sexuality, politics and AIDS in the South African lowveld, and is interested in the parallels between post-Apartheid in South Africa and post-Communism in the Czech Republic. He is currently writing the biography of a South African teacher.

Dr Melissa Parker has undertaken research in Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Ghana and London. Her publications address a wide range of issues including tropical diseases; maternal and child health; female circumcision and sexuality; HIV/AIDS and sexual networks; anthropology and public health.

Dr James Staples conducts fieldwork in South India, including long-term research with leprosy-affected people in a rural coastal community and, more recently, with disabled people in the major city of Hyderabad. His thematic interests include personhood, performance and the body; disability and notions of human rights; and marginal livelihoods, including begging.

Dr Dominique Behague specialises in the anthropology of psychiatry, the biomedical and social sciences, and the medicalisation of life-cycle transitions, including adolescence and young adulthood, in Southern Brazil. Recently, Dominique has conducted ethnographic research on the role of epidemiology and evidence-based medicine in global health politics and financing, with specific reference to the rise of global mental health.

Dr Will Rollason's research is based in south-east Papua New Guinea, focussing on issues of development, race and work in the post-colony. He has written on clothing, sports, tourism and colonial politics. Currently, he is working on the way in which indigenous ideas about the future affect contemporary engagements with capitalism and development.

The Anthropology Department has an associated research centre focusing on debates relevant to international policy makers and practitioners as well as debates current in social and biological anthropology in the light of research undertaken in the arena of international medical anthropology. See Centre for Research in International Medical Anthropology page.

Course Content

The main objectives of the course are to provide a rigorous grounding in key topics and perspectives in medical anthropology, and to equip candidates with a range of research skills to enable them to successfully complete research (either individually or part of a team).

Students have undertaken a huge range of important studies for dissertations in Britain, Europe and worldwide. Many have been used by NGOs, primary care trusts and UN agencies to assist their work as well as giving excellent demonstrations of the anthropologist's craft. Some recent examples of students' dissertations include:

• The management of Alzheimer's disease;
• The relationship between nurses and doctors in managing primary care;
• Cultural aspects of the management of premature babies;
• Private experiences and public encounters: selfhood and personhood amidst the chaos of homelessness;
• Life in a government-run leprosy colony in Nepal;
• An exploration into the role of girls abducted during the war in Sierra Leone;
• "This time I'm going to God because it doesn't cost money": managing mental illness and madness in Uganda.

Modules are subject to variation and students are advised to check with the School on whether a particular module of interest will be running in their year of entry.

Compulsory Modules

Medical Anthropology in Clinical and Community Settings
Main topics of study: Theoretical framings: Nature-nurture/culture-biology debates and the concept of local biologies; clinically and critically applied medical anthropology; risk perception and discourse on risk; narrative, suffering and subjectivity; biomedicine, population sciences and medicalisation; political economy of health and development; governance and politics of international aid; rights-based approach to health and bioethics; thematic examples: ‘adolescence’ and the life-cycle; cross-cultural psychiatry and community-based mental health; alternative therapies and medical pluralism; doctor-patient interactions; evidence-based medicine and policy-making; childbirth and maternal health; sexuality and reproductive health; genetics and biotechnology; medicines and pharmaceutical industry.

Anthropology of biomedicine and psychiatry
Main topics of study: history of science and biomedicine; diagnostic technologies and classification; biotechnology and the modern self; ethics of bio-experimentation; epistemologies of statistics, epidemiology and the population sciences; medicalisation of the life cycle, case studies in menopause and adolescence; politics of aid, development and post-colonial science; the rise of evidence-based medicine; biomedical psychiatry and bio-colonialism; culture and critical neuroscience; challenges in the ethnography of science; implications of anthropology of science for clinical practice and population health

Anthropology and Global Health
Main topics of study: changing conceptions of public health; constructing public health problems: the case of female circumcision; the social construction of epidemics; constructions of health and sickness in war zones; the changing relationship between anthropology and epidemiology; targeting people, targeting places: the limits of HIV prevention strategies; neglected tropical diseases and the case for targeted disease control programmes; public health and healing in the aftermath of war; evaluating public health policy; human rights and public health; ethical aspects of public health policy and practice.

Ethnographic Research Methods
Main topics of study: the centrality of fieldwork to anthropological research; theoretical and practical issues of participant observation, open-ended unstructured interviews and semi-structured interviews; the advantages and disadvantages of using questionnaires during fieldwork; different styles of ethnographic writing; gaining access in ethnographic research; ethical clearance and ethical dilemmas arising in the course of fieldwork; constructing a research proposal.

Dissertation
The specific topics and/or research problems discussed in the dissertation are a function of the student’s particular research interest in the domain of medical anthropology, and the data generated by the student’s own fieldwork.

Recent examples of dissertations by students taking this course include:

• The Management of Alzheimer's disease.
• The relationships between nurses and doctors in managing primary care.
• Private experiences and public encounters: selfhood and personhood amidst the chaos of homelessness.

Optional Modules

Kinship and New Directions in Anthropology
Main topics of study: descent and alliance, the household, the incest taboo, new reproductive technologies, kinship and the state, gay kinship, the abortion debate, conceptions of social reproduction, kinship and migration, the social and cultural construction of paternity.

Anthropology of the Body
Main Topics of Study: The social body; embodiment, ‘habitus’ and phenomenological approaches to the body; cross-cultural perceptions of the body; the body in parts; sex and gender; childhood and the body; bodily norms, beauty and ideas of the perfect body; biomedicine and the body; death and the dying body.

Anthropology of the Person
Main topics of study: theories of the person; the notion of 'normality'; the emergence of memero-politics; classifications, kinds, and kind-making; 'looping effects'; cultural bound syndrome and 'ecological niche'.

Anthropology of Disability and Difference
Main Topics of Study: A critical overview of the medical and social models of disability that have framed discourse on disability; ethnographic and phenomenological alternatives to such approaches; conducting fieldwork with cognitively and physically impaired people; disability across the life course, with a focus on childhood disability; identity and disability; social policy, development, the state and disability; ethical dilemmas and the new genetics.

Plus two unassessed reading modules

History and Theory of Social Anthropology
Main topics of study: evolutionary' anthropology; 'race', 'civilisation'; diffusionism and the Boas school; the development of ethnographic research; functional, structure and comparison; structuralism; neo-evolutionism; culture and the interpretation of cultures; critiques (Marxism, feminism, post-modernism).

Issues in Social Anthropology
Main topics of study: kinship; gender; religion; anthropology of the body.

Assessment

Assessment is variously by essay, practical assignments (eg, analysis of a short field exercise), and a dissertation of approximately 15,000 words. This dissertation is based upon fieldwork undertaken by the candidate. There are no examinations.

Careers

Students will acquire analytical and research skills that can be used in a wide range of careers. For instance, graduates will find that the degree enhances professional development in fields such as midwifery, general practice, sexual health, psychiatry, nutrition, psychotherapy, public health, non-governmental agencies and international development. Some of our graduates also go on to do further research for a PhD in medical anthropology.

Fees for 2013/14 entry

UK/EU students: £5,800 full-time; £2,900 part-time

International students: £12,000 full-time; £6,000 part-time

Read about funding opportunities available to postgraduate students

Fees quoted are per annum and are subject to an annual increase.

Entry Requirements

Normally a good Honours degree from a UK institution; an equivalent overseas qualification; or an equivalent professional qualification (eg from a health background or similar). Candidates not fully meeting these criteria may nevertheless be considered.

English Language Requirements

• IELTS: 6.5 (min 6 in all areas)
• TOEFL Paper test: 580 (TWE 4.5)
• TOEFL Internet test: 92 (R20, L20, S20, W20)
• Pearson: 59 (51 in all subscores)
• BrunELT 65% (min 60% in all areas)

Brunel also offers our own BrunELT English Test and accept a range of other language courses. We also have a range of Pre-sessional English language courses, for students who do not meet these requirements, or who wish to improve their English.