Anthropology
Embodied Minds: Culture, Politics, and Psychotherapy
Module code: L6310S
Level 6
30 credits in spring semester
Teaching method: Workshop
Assessment modes: Essay
This course will trace the differences and divergences between anthropology and psychotherapy as modes of human encounter and understanding, and as developing disciplines over the past century or so. It will explore the different contexts in which anthropology and psychotherapy are done and how they have influenced one another. We will investigate how psychotherapeutic theories and practices have changed and been challenged as they travel from one context to another. We will take an anthropological approach to the rise and popularity of psychotherapy in the West and elsewhere asking what the key cultural and political precedents and conditions are for psychotherapy鈥檚 increasing globalisation. We will ask too how our own deep assumptions about the relations between mind, body, and environment shape our understandings and interactions with others. Thus we will explore the limitations and potentials of a therapeutically-inspired anthropology.
Module learning outcomes
- Explore how the experience and understanding of one鈥檚 own mind is embedded in and shaped by distinct political, economic, and sociocultural systems
- Critically examine psychotherapeutic and anthropological theory in relation to one another, recognising the limitations and potentials of both.
- Use ethnographic methodologies and sensitivities to investigate the increasingly global production, circulation, and reception of psychotherapeutic theories and practices as nonetheless culturally and politically situated.
- Write a reflexive essay that critically enquires into how culture and politics have affected your own understanding and experience of mind in relation to, and in comparison with, the understandings and experiences of others.