The Anthropology of Wounds: A medical humanities and urban ethnography approach

This course will build towards an anthropological understanding of wounds through an interrogation of the relationship between social theory, medical humanities, and urban studies. We will trace the relationship between the wounds inhered within our bodies and the wounds inhered in urban landscapes and reflect on the possibilities of approaching wounds as containers for past-present histories. What might such an understanding of wounds tell us about the worlds that our wounded bodies and wounded cities refuse and of the worlds that they (re)make? How do we theorize our wounds by way of ethnographic research? And how might this approach to wounds inform the ways in which knowledge production, artistic practices, and communal caregiving can be reinvented?

Weekly discussions will incorporate assigned materials from Cairo and Palestine-inspired visual, musical, and literary arts as well as medical humanities, urban studies, contemporary social theory, intellectual history, and the histories of modern medicine in North Africa and Southwest Asia. This course will also offer the class an opportunity to read canonized texts in contemporary social theory with an attunement to their relationship to psychiatry. Many revisited texts in contemporary social theory—whether by Fanon, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Foucault, and others—are inextricable from the intellectual environment that (co)produced the radical psychiatry and institutional psychotherapy movements. Together, we will consider the questions that emerge when we revisit this relationship.

An underlying thematic throughout the course is the relationship between art, anthropology, and community-oriented clinical practices. We will consider their enmeshments as well as their shared methodologies, theoretical concerns, and political stakes. To this end, as we build towards our final projects, we will encourage one another to explore methodologies of collective knowledge production—with academics, artists, and healthcare practitioners.