Spring 2025 Religion UN3323 section 001

Religion and Medicine in South Asia: Psy

RELI & MED IN SOUTH ASIA

Call Number 00632
Day & Time
Location
W 4:10pm-6:00pm
To be announced
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Meghan E Hartman
Type SEMINAR
Course Description

In this course, students will come to see the imbrication of religion, power, and mental illness across South Asia by examining experiences of suffering and its management; the history of psychiatry in the British colonial era and its afterlives; and the relationship of religion to concepts of mental and emotional disorder. Students will identify models for medical structures of care, healing, and treatments in the context of religion, ritual, and quotidian life. Topics include diagnostic processes and the creation of categories, stigma and models of clinical care, hysteria, spirit possession, pharmaceuticals, and the relationship of trauma to political structures. This course has three sections: 1) the first portion undertakes a brief historical survey of medical disciplines and institutions in South Asia (such as the development of Ayurveda, Yunānī Ṭibb, and the rise of the bīmāristān); 2) the second portion of the course focuses on the rise of the asylum (sometimes called the pāgal khāna) in tandem with psychiatry and its twinned consequence: the pathologization of asceticism by British colonial technologies of discipline; 3) the final portion examines the relationship between British colonialism and psychoanalysis with the introduction of this western discipline to the subcontinent. 

This course will take critical stock of historical structures throughout South Asia claiming to provide care (such as family, caste, healthcare, mental asylums, colonialism, educational systems, pensions, and much more). As a result, students come to consider concepts of social suffering, biopolitics, biosociality, political subjectivity, and postcolonial disorder. 

Primary source material will include the following: śāstra, ethnography, clinical studies, poetry, scripture, ritual texts across Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. 

 

 

Web Site Vergil
Department Religion @Barnard
Enrollment 15 students (15 max) as of 5:05PM Sunday, December 8, 2024
Status Full
Subject Religion
Number UN3323
Section 001
Division Barnard College
Section key 20251RELI3323V001