 I'll give you a very brief sort of introduction and overview over what we do here at SOAS and what the Medical Endropology Programme is all about, you know, maybe taking more than maybe 15, 20 minutes and then you get the floor, you get to ask questions about the programme. Now, I'm sure you've all seen the home page. You have some information already at hand, but it always makes a difference to see the person who will be teaching you in the end. In this case, me. Hello. Fabio Gigi. I'm currently here, lecturer in anthropology with reference to Japan and I'm co-convening the Medical Anthropology Programme together with Dr. Orkide Beruzan, who is currently on research leave, which is why she can't join us here today. So I couldn't stop myself from bringing in something very current. You can see on the image, this is something that is literally happening at the moment. My specialty is Japan. I've lived in Japan for over eight years, all in all, my first position, teaching position and research position were both in Japan. And so yes, if you're following the development of the COVID-19 epidemic, and I hope you're all safely ensconced wherever you are and washing your hands regularly and religiously, then you may have come across this little bit of trivia. The Prime Minister of Japan declared a state of emergency this morning, and it's quite interesting to see. I was in Tokyo until February this year, and so the first cases already sort of happened or the first contagions happened in January, but for some reason Japan has maintained a very slow spread. So it's quite interesting from a medical anthropology perspective, of course, to look into that. But one of the interesting things, of course, is also how people deal with it, and that's one of the core questions of medical anthropology. And so there was this rediscovery of this strange creature, which you can see here, which is an amabie, which wasn't very well known, it's called a yōkai, a monstrous or strange or slightly supernatural appearance, and it first appeared at the beginning of the 19th century of the coast of Kumamoto. And apparently it said, you can see it's a kind of mermaid-type figure, it said that if you create the representation of me, that representation will be able to ward off epidemics. So very topical, right? And so if you go onto Japanese Twitter you'll see quite a few of these reinventions, sort of you can see on the right-hand side here, a more modern form of the amabie, sort of like a comic character rather. So very interesting to see that of course in a pandemic the most important thing is the medical expertise and the epidemiologists. But there also are other streams of interpretation that helps us to make sense of what is happening. And some of these, of course, religious, some of these have to do with the supernatural or any other kind of worldview that inflects this. So I just wanted to bring this in as sort of a current reverence. So very broadly speaking, what is medical anthropology? I expect you already have sort of a broad idea what this is all about, but just to reiterate medical anthropology is a sub-discipline of cultural or social anthropology. The distinction here is really cultural in itself. Usually in America what we do is called cultural anthropology while in Britain it's called social anthropology. But they both mean the same thing, essentially the science of cultural difference. What is this difference? How does it constitute different ways of relating to the world? How does it explain humanity in its manifold appearances and expressions? So medical anthropology specifically then looks at individual, local and cultural understandings of illness and health and how these are related to historical and cultural differences. So you can see three levels already from the individual to the local which means community, but in current terms can mean larger networks. You all know you're talking or I'm talking to you now. I'm in London. You may be at any other place in the world. And yet we sort of form a temporary community in which we share understandings of what it means to be healthy and what it means to be ill. And culture understands, again, there's the question of how large these entities are. Can we still speak of distinct cultures or in the age of globalization? Do we have to look at the long picture and to look at international streams? How certain understandings get imported from one place to another? Or conversely, how certain international understandings, global health, for example, how, what influence they have on the ground and how they are made sense of by, again, people in local settings, right? So three levels there, illness and health obviously being sort of the core components of the interests that guide medical anthropology. And then how these are related to historical and cultural differences more broadly. So both cultural, which means synchronously at the same time, but also historically, because our understandings have grown historically. They come out of a particular context, they evolve and then they move from one context to another. But each concept that we use, no matter how taken for granted, it appears in their life has a history. And often we are not aware of this history. And so part of it is not only just thinking of illness or health understandings thereof as expressions of different cultural backgrounds, but it's also something that you need to unpack historically. So moving on, and this is from the American Society for Medical Anthropology, which is part of the American Anthropological Association. This is sort of, you know, one attempt to visualize sort of many of the aspects that, you know, the science, the discipline deals with. So you can see here, if what you're interested in, let's say, does not feature on this chart at all, maybe you're more interested in social anthropology or in any other MA program in anthropology. But this is sort of, this is what a medical anthropology really is about. Sorry, that's hopefully not a bad omen. Everybody here in London is quite nervous at the moment seeing what will happen to our Prime Minister. So, yes. Yes. So another way of sort of trying to understand what medical anthropology is and how it is different from other forms of social science is to look at what kind of question that medical anthropology asks. And here are sort of three core questions that every medical anthropologist with their salt must answer. And that's the question of power that looms very large in all of these. And that's how that's why medical anthropology is crucially linked to discourses of inequality and power differentials, right? So, core question, who has the power to define what counts as healthy or sick as normal and abnormal? And already you can see there is a projection of the first two terms, healthy or thick, onto the other ones, normal or abnormal, which leads to a very broad set of questions that are very relevant to anthropology, to sociology, to criminology, to any kind of social science, a question of how does society define what is normal and what is abnormal? How do you understand what counts as healthy or sick? And of course, we anthropologists always emphasize that there are many different cultural understandings that differ in the way they define states of health or states of illness, right? And we'll see a few examples of that later on, right? The second question, so this is sort of, this is a good part of the local distribution of power. Who gets to say what is pathological? Who gets to say what is normal? And normal, of course, meaning good here. So there's an ethical dimensions, of course, always implied. So the second question then, how do structural inequalities shape individual experiences of illness? Now, this is sort of the core idea of critical medical anthropology, is to look on one hand at the individual understanding, at the very local, at literally the micro ethnography. Ethnography is what we do, is fieldwork, is meaning you embed yourself in a community, you live with them, usually for a year if you do a PhD research, and you describe in minute detail what is happening, everyday interaction, you try to understand what the taken for granted implicit meaning of the cultural background is, and you try to describe this in as dense a manner as possible. And this is called thick descriptions, right? So you have that on one hand, but then you need to connect it to the larger question of why it is like that, and how larger global forces impinge on individual situations, and how inequality, power differentials, vulnerability is not equally distributed. It is very much in, it falls in line with other concepts in anthropology, with gender, ethnicity or race, all these things come together to create a particular experience and for anthropology to be meaningful as a social science, we need to disentangle these different aspects. And then the last question, how are understandings of illness represented, transmitted and contested? That's the question of mediation or representation. Remember the first example of the amabie, it's a representation of both something that is dangerous, the illness you represent as represented as a sort of supernatural being, but also it is, it contains in nature at its core, it contains the cure, in a sense the representation of what ails you already allows you to distance yourself from it and sort of to, to create, to contain the threat. And that you have in many medical religious discourses, the idea that representing something correctly can have an alleviating effect, can help you get both a sense of psychological security, but it also helps you deal in the real world. And of course, you could argue that in the current crisis, statistics are part of that, right? We read every day with dread the numbers of people who die from COVID-19. And yet there is something about the numbers, there's something about the way that this allows us to have an understanding of the trajectory that also creates a sense of not complete control, of course, but the unpredictability of the threat is alleviated, right? So representation, how these representations are transmitted from one context to another, and how they are contested, how often through grassroot movements, people come together and say, this is representing us. We don't want to be known as belonging to this category of people. And therefore, we change this perception. I'll just give you one example. There is in the UK, a very interesting movement called the Hearing Voices Network. And they are campaigning to remove hearing voices as a diagnostic category that belongs to schizophrenia. And as criticism of schizophrenia is a very complicated and very little understood mental illness, but sort of the classical depiction is paranoid, delusional, do you hear voices that tell you to do things? And the Voices Network, essentially, is a patient or a client network, as they prefer to call it, of people who do hear voices occasionally, but who are not suffering from schizophrenia. So they come together and they campaign for a better understanding, a better public understanding of what hearing voices actually means, right? And so it's an attempt that you can say this is they're trying to contest the representation, the sort of the stereotypical representation of schizophrenia. If you're interested in that, you can simply Google Hearing Voices Network and the link should come up. Right. So what is special about medical anthropology at SOAS? We call it MedAnth. It's not very beautiful to look at, but I didn't have enough space on the PowerPoint because there's so many things that are very special to SOAS. As you may know, there's also medical anthropology programs in very close in our surroundings. There's an Emmy in Global Health at KCL, Kings College, London towards the Strand. UCL has a medical anthropology grade, which I was graduating from. But what is special about what we do here? So there's broadly speaking three things. There's the regional expertise. Now, this doesn't mean that we only do these regions, but the sort of the three people who are involved in the degree program are specialized in these regions. So that's Iran and Middle East and North America for Orkideberuzan. Japan and East Asia for me and South Asia and the UK for Professor David Moss, who teaches the module Mind, Culture and Psychiatry, which is sort of the other medical anthropology module that we offer. So that's one thing. Doesn't mean that if you're interested in other regions of the world, we want to read and learn about them. Quite the opposite. We have actually an enormous, broad spread of regions on offer. But these are our research foci. So we are specializing in these areas. So regional expertise on the one side, thematic expertise on the other. And that's very important because medical anthropology, as any subdiscipline of anthropology can be done in a number of ways. And at CERS, we are very much aligned with this course of critical medical anthropology. So there's an emphasis on the global south, knowledge creation in the global south, rather than just looking at the latest thing is coming out of America, Europe. But at the same time, we are very all of us, the three of us are interested in science and technology studies. So we're not just looking at indigenous notions of healing. But we look at how modern technology changes the way we understand the human body, but it also changes the way we understand personhood. What does it mean to be a person? How do we understand the individual? Are we open to others? Or are we conceived to be very closed off and monatic, so to speak? And so that's a science and technology studies. And then, broadly speaking, we take a very critical approach to psychiatry, biomedicine and global health. So it's, we're a bit less going home than the development people, you could say, about the idea of global health. We think there is it's it's it's an important movement spearheaded by the WHO, of course, but there are interesting power dynamics that unfold when you take a sort of internationally agreed, which internationally agreed meaning agreed by the medical buddies in Europe and America, and then try to spread it across the world and treating everything else as mere superstition, right? So we look at these critically, we look at how knowledge is localized, what happens on the ground, both in psychiatry and biomedicine, and in the sort of global health discourse at large. And then the third, the third point synergy with us as an institution, again, you can take a range of courses which you can see if you go to the website and you look at looking at it right now, looking at the structure of the MA anthropology degree, you can see the courses that you can choose. And there's of course, there are lots of interesting things that you can do it. So as we have the greatest concentration of expertise in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia in Europe used to be in the world. Yeah. And we have a special focus on development and languages. So the institutional environment is also very important, I think. So very briefly, just to introduce the people who teach. So Dr. Orchide Berezan, she is the real thing because she is actually a doctor. I'm just a PhD in anthropology, which is also doctor. But well, I faint if I have to give blood. So, you know, as a medical practitioner. Yes, you wouldn't you wouldn't you wouldn't want to rely on me. But she she is the real thing. She did her Dr. Met in Tehran PhD in anthropology from an anthropology and history from MIT. She taught at MIT University of Texas Medical Branch and King's College London. And she's had so since 2017. If you're interested in her work, she has run written a wonderful book called Prozac Diaries, Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran. And that really gives you the perfect introduction to that course. So very briefly, I want I want to give you enough time to to to ask questions. So just to give you a sense of what the content of the course actually is, these are the this is the breakdown of the weekly sessions. So we have core course, this core course is called Medical Anthropology in Global Perspective. This is what you have to do as a medical anthropologist. And then there's models that you can choose. Again, you can see the modules on the list. So you do introduction, biomedicine as culture, which is important to point out because we tend to assume that Oh, there's medicine and then there's culture and medicine is actual science. So that's real and culture is just something made up. But actually, that's of course, as anthropologists, we don't think that is the case. But more importantly, even biomedicine has a culture. It has its own way of looking at the world that is distinct from other ways. And it's not because it's not distinct because it has a better access to reality. So this, this is sort of the first part of the course trying to destabilize certain assumptions that we automatically made. Then we have two sessions on medicalization, medicalization being the process by which a social problem becomes a medical problem. And Orchide will deal with the way that this has led to do different approaches in medical anthropology, interpretive medical anthropology on one hand, and critical medical anthropology on the other. Then there's a session on knowledge production in the global south, film screening, a session on subjectivity, memory and social ruptures. And then regarding the pain of others, representation and refugee health also sort of a very topic at the moment. So Orchide teaches the first term, I will teach a core course the second term. My name is Fabio Guicchi, as I said, my PhD is in social anthropology from UCL just next door to SOAS. My first job was as an assistant professor for sociology at the University in Kyoto. And I've been at SOAS since 2013. I'm working on mental illness, and more specifically on hoarding and disposal in Japan, hoarding is, you know, when people can't throw things away. And I look at this from a very, from also partly science and technology kind of perspective, looking at how we deal with the stuff that's around us. So I'm both interested in medical anthropology, but also in material culture. And because of that material culture aspect, my half of the term, which you can see here, sorry, let's just say core course term two, is slightly more focused towards materiality. We look at how the body is commodified, we look at organ transplantation and the different discourses that surround that. If you if you're familiar with that, you may have heard the expression, the gift of life, which is sort of a discursive device to keep the organ itself from becoming a commodity which you can pay for. So trying to not create a market, but of course, the black market for organs, that is also an international kind of trade. So we look at the many interesting and complex ironies of organ transplantation. Then sort of following the threat of materiality, we look at the substances, blood and semen and everything else really look at kinship and biological citizenship of how these ideas have become politicized and in what contexts. Then we look at the body itself, we look at sex and gender, that's sort of an important buddies that overlaps, of course, with the anthropology of gender. And then the second session looks at racialized and steticized bodies, trying to understand how being racialized, being perceived as belonging to a particular group or ethnicity will change the way you relate to your body and other people relate to it as well. But also looking at the burgeoning industry of cosmetic surgery, which often has as sort of not often talked about ethnic aspect of people trying to change their appearance in line with certain expectations of beauty. And of course, these expectations themselves are culturally formed. Then there's always a few weeks, then we have a reading week, and then we continue with the anthropology of sleep and dreams. This is one of my favorite topics at the moment. We look at why we sleep and how we sleep and what we dream and what to make of dreams as well. The session after that is technology of seeing. That is sort of a more science and technology kind of study. We look at the medical gaze and how looking inside the body has changed the way we think about ourselves. We look at the emerging new neurosciences of the brain that sort of provide us with a very different notion of how to understand who we are as human beings. You know, it's no longer the soul, it's the brain in your head that makes you a person, and that has quite interesting and often unintended sort of ramifications. Continuing with that with the idea of the mind, we look at the substance of the mind, hallucinations and psychopharmacy, how you can literally change your mind with drugs and what happens and how we can understand what happens in these cases. This mostly with reference to Tonya Lerman's excellent work. If you want to read something else, read Orchid Day's book, but if you want to prepare, if you're interested, one excellent book to read is Tonya Lerman's When God Talks Back. Wonderful ethnographic work on evangelical Christians in the US and how they understand their relationship with God. Speaking of which, next session, pain and suffering, that is, again, we take a phenomenological approach and you'll find out what means in the session and thinking about it in phenomenological, meaning in subjective, but also in neurological terms. What is pain? What is a nervous perception? How do we perceive pain? How is pain created in the body? And how is it, again, distributed? How do we understand pain as a state of being and what political ramification does that have? And the last session is called AIDS and Global Epidemiologies, which looks at the still ongoing AIDS crisis in the age of treatment. So there's a very interesting shift happening after HIV being HIV positive, now it's considered to be a chronic disease rather than a death-feeling illness. And that has, again, all kinds of ramifications for how people understand it, how stigma is reallocated and how we deal with life. Excellent. So that was quite long. Thank you for your attention. And I'm open for questions. Yes, I tend to speak slower when I'm in class, but it is just because it's quite odd to speaking into the void. My neighbours must think I've gone mad. That's a very good question. Truthfully, we don't know at the moment. We are hoping, of course, that after the lockdown ends that we will go back to normal over summer and that next term will start normally, but it's impossible to predict at the moment. If we are not able to go back, it will be taught online. But it's, I think, important to be on, I think it's very important to be, you know, it's possible to do it. And I've taught the last, the end of the last course that's still ongoing online. But of course, it's always nicer to be in a room together. But yes, it's impossible to predict. It's planning to reopen. But the school has been very careful not to stoke too many hopes. Yes, please. You mean the material, the handbook? Ah, yeah. But see, what we do is we do it via Zoom. So it is, there's no recording of the course. It's just, it does happen live, the seminars. There are some of the lectures are recorded, especially when the whole thing started. So I can send you a recording of one of the lectures. I just write down your name. Okay. What are you particularly interested in? Okay, okay. Okay. I choose one, a representative one. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Either via chat. Ah, that's a good. So normally, the MA dissertations are done in two ways. Either you do a sort of in-depth literature research, you develop a thesis, and then you look at the current literature, and you draw together, create your own argument. The other possibility is to do fieldwork. And yes, you can do fieldwork. But it will be short term. So usually term three is used for that. So if you do a one year MA program, you do, you start with the courses, two terms of course work, and then literally now in spring, you start developing your dissertation project. And if you want to do fieldwork, you can do two or three months of fieldwork before coming back in summer and writing up. So there is a possibility, but it is quite a stressful experience. It's good to know very clearly and early on what you want to do. Then you can, you can do fieldwork. Hi, am I audible? Yes, you are. Hello. Yeah, hi. I needed to understand how the assessments are going to be taking place. Subject to print, or is it same? Is there some sort of a general examination for all of them? Because I remember reading the course description where they have mentioned some of the courses are assessed through the essays or presentation or something of that sort. So how is the assessment? So there is no. Yes, thank you. So there is no big examination. All the assessments for the core courses are via essay and book review. So after half of the course, you write a book review on a book of your choice. It's a full, should be a full length monograph, so an ethnographic monograph. You write a review, which is a summary and a critique of the argument. That's the first piece of assessment. And then you have an essay that is due at the end of each term. So you write for the core course, you write two book reviews, one for each, and two essays. And the essays are 2,500 word essays on a topic. And the topics are closely aligned with the sessions that we teach. So there will be one essay, a question about organ transplantation. There will be a question about international understandings of depression, for example. And you do the reading and you show a draft to your supervisor and you write the essay. And that is the assessment. And then, of course, the biggest piece of work that is assessed the MA dissertation. So there's no exam aspect. OK, great. Thank you. Thank you. And maybe I should I should add about the fieldwork question. Of course, yes, you can do fieldwork, but I want you to bear in mind that being fieldwork in a medical institution, for example, is ethically very difficult and it has become much more difficult with the new Data Protection Act. It is possible, but there is quite a lot of hopes to jump through. And there's a whole ethics committee at school level that will be involved as well. So yes, you can do fieldwork, but you have to think about it carefully and prepare for it well. Any other questions? Yes, please. Oh, my email address and reference email. I'll write this down just now. OK, so that's my email address. You can ask all the questions that you have. Just drop me an email there. Sometimes there will be. I won't be able to respond immediately, but, you know, I should get back to you within a week or so. As for the question, can I conduct it outside of law? Yes, yes, you can. Of course, you don't have to be in England at all. But there's a limited amount of support that we can give. So you can conduct it outside of law. You can conduct it anywhere in the world, but you will have to organize much of it yourself. I'm just saying this because if you do a PhD, for example, and you go for a fieldwork for one year, usually try to create some kind of institutional affiliation, and that won't be possible for just two or three months of fieldwork. So was there another question? I saw. Yes. OK. Yes, please. Hello. Hi, may I ask? Yes, this is a cake again. So people who completed this may work, what are they like a possibility if you wanted to go for a PhD? There is quite a few people going to PhD programs. So this is one of the reasons why Orkida and I devised the course the way it is. We wanted to create a pathway to PhD programs. And so so far, this has worked quite well. We've had students go on to PhDs in all different parts of the world, some very successfully. So, yes, this is this is part of the idea. OK, great. Thank you. Yes, please. Yojana, is that am I pronouncing this? Hi, it's Yojana. It's it's Yojana. Yojana. Hello. Yeah, hi. So I had another question about the supervisors, as you mentioned, how are they decided? Do we get to approach them? Or is there some criteria on which we are selected by them? There you can approach if you have a particular person you want to work with. Yes, but that it's not always possible to assign you to that person. And there's many reasons for that. One is because we need to have some kind of equal distribution. But the other is also that people may be on research leave, right, you know, especially others of the department. But usually if you're working on a project that a professor is working on or is interested in, then automatically the M.A. tutor will assign you to that person. So we can't always guarantee it, but usually it makes sense to, you know, to have people work with the supervisors that are suited to their interests. Yeah, that makes it clear. Thank you. Thank you. OK, any any any more questions? So my you see my email on the side of G5 at so AC dot UK. And so if you have any other questions, please. Drop me an email. So thank you all for listening. And well, yes, I hope I hope I'll see you at some point. It's always nicer to meet, you know, at an open day or an inside day and actually, you know, to walk around the buildings to get a sense of the atmosphere and so on. But yes, sadly, that's not really possible at the moment. Yes, yes, I know. I'm not quite sure. It's like I I don't know, maybe because there is there is a source moderator who is is organizing these. And so, yeah, it's like I would say, well, if you, you know, if you have to go somewhere, feel free to leave. Oh, and I see so as events left the session. So I think, yes, I think we are pretty much. Well, I guess that's it then. If you don't have an urgent question right now, then you say, yes. That's it. Thank you very much. It's great seeing you too. Thank you. Much appreciated. Take care. You know, don't go outside too much and wash your hands. That's all I can say for the moment. So thank you very much and goodbye.