Indigenous Peoples around the world struggle with unequal access to health care and stark health disparities as compared to other communities. They also tend to have a much broader understanding of health and illness as compared to the medical and public health professions. This course will help students understand Indigenous perspectives on health and illness, with a particular focus on Indigenous communities from North America and Taiwan. In order to tackle this challenge, we will first focus on some basic anthropological approaches to culture, health, and illness, before we turn to scholarship on selected Indigenous communities (including work by Indigenous scholars). This course will contain two sections.

In Part I: Anthropological Foundations, we will explore some of the basic anthropological approaches to culture, health, and illness. This work will enable us to better understand our material on specific Indigenous communities. In Part II: Indigenous Perspectives, we will use our key concepts to explore the health concerns confronting many Indigenous Peoples. In the process, we will learn that questions of health and illness in many Indigenous groups are closely tied to the social, political, and ecological challenges confronting these communities.