Anthropological Approaches to Health Interventions

Traditional approaches to health focus on the individual and are limited in that they take little account of context; local, cultural, social, environmental or global. This course gives students a unique opportunity to examine the central individual and structural approaches to public health, and will equip them with the skills to make a reflexive examination of their own presuppositions about approaches to public health issues and the effective translation of health interventions. The course draws on a wide range of case examples from the literature to make explicit the ways in which there are hidden models directing health interventions, most of which ignore context.