RELI 086 - (CC, IS) Biomedicine, Bodies and Barriers: Cultural Obstacles in HealthcareSemester Hours: 3
Once a Year
This course will equip students with the requisite skills to negotiate the barriers that arise in healthcare due to cultural and religious diversity. Because of its origins in Western monotheistic cultures, biomedicine relies on norms and assumptions about the body that are not always shared by people from different cultures of origin. (For example, people who come from religious cultures that believe in multiple souls often make very different decisions at the end of life because they do not confine the soul to the brain.) The course begins by exploring the cultural roots and implications of biomedicine’s investment in seeing the body through the lens of particular biological norms; it explores how biomedicine is utilized in religious cultures that understand bodily vitality quite differently and concludes by learning about Traditional Chinese Medicine in which the biological body is perceived less as anatomical and more as the metamorphosis of qi.
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