We will also examine the history of witchcraft accusation, in which narrative redescription helped to hurt many innocent people. Interrelationships of aspects of individual personality and various aspects of sociocultural systems are considered. Relations of sociocultural contexts to motives, values, cognition, personal adjustment, stress and pathology, and qualities of personal experience are emphasized. We examine the medical profession, the sick and the healers, and culture as communication in the medical event through aspects of medical practice and medical research of medicine as well as primitive and peasant systems. Examines life-history research as a method for understanding the cultural and psychological experience of people.
Students develop a life-history project, conduct interviews, and analyze data.
Consent of instructor. The course focuses on theoretical models for the evolution of complex societies and on archaeological evidence for the development of various pre and protohistoric states in selected areas of the Old and New Worlds. This class critically explores the place of cultural factors in constructing life problems, explanatory models, healing roles and curative devices in psychiatry, as articulated by anthropological and psychiatric scholarship. Special emphasis will be put on clinical material from Jewish sources. This class focuses on the cultural implications of the main political, sociocultural, ethnic, and religious cleavages in Israeli society as represented and accounted for in the anthropological literature on Israel.