Additional Specialty Areas in the Department of Anthropology

Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology is a very broad, interdisciplinary, and inter-subdisciplinary field, encompassing scholars who study a wide variety of specific topics relating to health, illness, and healing from sociocultural, biocultural, clinically applied, and other related perspectives. Although medical anthropology is not a separate program at the University of Washington, a rich array of resources are available to support those who wish to concentrate in medical anthropology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington includes an unusually large and varied contingent of medical anthropologists among its regular full-time faculty. On the sociocultural faculty are three anthropologists with primary interests in critical, interpretive, and applied anthropology of medicine. Lorna A. Rhodes has researched and written about biomedicine, psychiatry, and institutions in the United States, as well as religion and healing in Sri Lanka. Janelle S. Taylor has researched and written on conceptualizations of "culture" within "cultural competence" efforts in medical education, and on the role of surrogate decisionmakers in end-of-life care, as well as on technology, medicine, and media in the practices and politics of reproduction in the United States. Rachel R. Chapman has active research programs in both the U.S. and Mozambique, and has interests in urban health, racial and ethnic disparities in health, reproductive health, applied international health, and political economy.

On the faculty of the biocultural anthropology program is Donna Leonetti, whose research interests include biological and behavioral interactions which affect health, fertility, and child growth as affected by household ecology, social epidemiology of diabetes, and cardiovascular disease and aging among Asian-American ethnic groups. Bettina Shell-Duncan studies epidemiology, disease ecology, demography, and maternal and child morbidity and mortality in East Africa.

Two more medical anthropologists affiliated with the Department of Anthropology are located in the School of Nursing. Noel J. Chrisman has research interests in urban anthropology, applied anthropology, ethnicity, and social networks in the United States. Barbara Burns McGrath has taught medical anthropology and studies healing in Polynesia, HIV/AIDS in U.S. Pacific Island communities, and new genetic science and technologies.

Yet another medical anthropologist with connections to the Department of Anthropology is based in the International Health Program, of the School of Public Health. James Pfeiffer has research interests in East Africa and in the topics of international health, applied anthropology, political economy, and religion.

Medical anthropologists at the University of Washington also participate in and benefit from a wide range of other programs and research groups outside the department. Two notable examples are the Critical Medical Humanities project, and the Science Studies Network, both supported by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Linguistic Anthropology

The study of linguistic anthropology is an integral part of the sociocultural anthropology program at the University of Washington. The importance of language in culture cannot be overstated: as a medium of symbolic communication, it enables the existence of culture. Language permeates consciousness and allows people make sense of their world. In using language people not only convey meanings, but also create them.

While no study of society and culture is possible without using and analyzing language, the field of linguistic anthropology explicitly focuses on understanding the power and the constraints of the linguistic medium. Does language shape thought? What cognitive structures are revealed in the ways that people categorize their world? How does language use enact social identities? How does language reinforce social inequalities? How do structures of narratives reveal value systems and efforts to make sense of what has happened? In what ways do unconscious rules of conversation compel people to act in certain ways? How are political, cultural, and economic struggles played out through language use?

The field of linguistic anthropology encompasses all of these questions, and thus includes a wide variety of methodological approaches. While the field of linguistics traditionally treats language as a system separable from its context of social use, it provides a grounding in the structural features of language, which is a prerequisite for study in linguistic anthropology as well. Within linguistics, the subfield of sociolinguistics studies the impact of social factors on linguistic structures and thus has much in common with linguistic anthropology.