Illness and Healing
UndergraduateMAQ-ANTX20022025
Previously MAQ-ANTX202
Course information for 2025 intake View information for 2024 course intake
Examine healing practices and attitudes to illness from across the globe. Step into the world of biomedicine and shamanism. Think about attitudes to mental health and madness. Scan the role of imaging technologies in modern medicine.
- Study method
- 100% online
- Assessments
- 100% online
- Enrol by
- 20 July 2025
- Entry requirements
- Prior study needed
- Duration
- 13 weeks
- Price from
- $2,160
- Upfront cost
- $0
- Loan available
- HECS-HELP and FEE-HELP available
Illness and Healing
About this subject
On successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- Demonstrate command of anthropological knowledge and theory as it relates to medical anthropology and the broader study of illness and healing practices in their social and cultural contexts.
- Identify the processes through which biology, culture, politics, and ecology interact to shape illness and health, health systems, and patterns.
- Research, analyse, and represent the illness experience of a person or community, emphasizing the integrative factors (culture, politics, social structure, etc.) influencing the condition.
- Identify and apply the theories and concepts of medical anthropology to critically evaluate one’s own culture and determinants of illness and health.
- Analyse how illness and health (and normality) are constructed within particular social, cultural, political, and environmental contexts.
- Analyse how inequality, social hierarchy, and structural violence generate unequal and often unique health determinants in the global and transnational context.
- A week-by-week guide to the topics you will explore in this subject will be provided in your study materials.
This unit introduces a perspective on illness and healing that opens up when we give central importance to human experiences of what it is to be ill or to be healed. This means that we do not necessarily have to choose between biology and sociology, between individual and culture. These elements get integrated – and this insight comes through in the more holistic understandings of “alternative” therapies as well as in the accounts we have of healing traditions from around the world. But how and where does this integration occur? To answer this, we need to refer to experience, both individual and collective. The unit will give priority to richly experiential accounts made available in ethnographies, as well as in other kinds of writing such as literature and introduce a perspective called phenomenology. As we seek to understand the wide variety of ways in which different cultural histories have understood what it means to be ill or to be healed, we will necessarily go deeper into some of anthropology’s most fundamental challenge – it tells us that what it means to be ‘human’ is fundamentally a relationship to the world around us, and that world has been understood in very different ways across time and place.
- Ethnographic Essay (30%)
- Take Home Exam (30%)
- Tutoial Participation (20%)
- Mid session quiz (20%)
For textbook details check your university's handbook, website or learning management system (LMS).
This research-intensive university in north-western Sydney offers a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. With over 44,000 current students, Macquarie has a strong reputation for welcoming international students and embracing flexible and convenient study options, including its partnership with Open Universities Australia.
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- 10
- Times Higher Education Ranking 2024:
- 10
Entry requirements
Prior study
You must have successfully completed the following subject(s) before starting this subject:
Equivalent subjects
You should not enrol in this subject if you have successfully completed any of the following subject(s) because they are considered academically equivalent:
MAQ-ANT202 (Not currently available)
MAQ-ANTX202 (Not currently available)
Others
NCCW (pre-2020 units): ANT202, ANTH202, ANTH274, ANTX202
NCCW (2020 and onwards): ANTH2002 Illness and Healing
Pre-requisite: 40 cps at 1000 level or above
Additional requirements
- Other requirements - Students who have an Academic Standing of Suspension or Exclusion under Macquarie University's Academic Progression Policy are not permitted to enrol in OUA units offered by Macquarie University. Students with an Academic Standing of Suspension or Exclusion who have enrolled in units through OUA will be withdrawn.
Study load
- 0.125 EFTSL
- This is in the range of 10 to 12 hours of study each week.
Equivalent full time study load (EFTSL) is one way to calculate your study load. One (1.0) EFTSL is equivalent to a full-time study load for one year.
Find out more information on Commonwealth Loans to understand what this means to your eligibility for financial support.
What to study next?
Once you’ve completed this subject it can be credited towards one of the following courses
UndergraduateMAQ-ART-DEG
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