Psychological and Medical Anthropology: Home & Introduction

Please note that this is reproduced from the UCSD Anthropology Department Website:

UCSD’s Psychological and Medical Anthropology Program seeks to understand the psychological dimension of being human as an integral and dynamic part of social and cultural life. The UCSD Department of Anthropology has been one of the major centers for graduate training in psychological anthropology since the founding of the department in 1968. The program offers students the opportunity to discover what has been learned in anthropology about mind and self, emotion and cognition, agency and experience, motivation and human development, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, illness and disease, psychiatric disorder and psychic well-being, religion and healing, embodiment and perception. Under the guidance of faculty who have made major contributions to the field, students develop the knowledge of theory and methods needed to conduct their own research.  Students who have been trained in psychological anthropology at UCSD have gone on to teach and pursue research at colleges, universities, and research centers across the United States. Graduates of the program have made significant contributions in teaching and research, and have advanced anthropological inquiry regarding a broad range of research topics.

Psychological/Medical Anthropology at UCSD is devoted to understanding human experience from an anthropological perspective. The program at UCSD is holistic, pursuing an understanding of the lives and experiences of persons based on the knowledge of society, culture, biology, and psychology. Training in psychological anthropology is integrated into the graduate program, so that students can obtain a thorough-going and well-rounded training in social, cultural, linguistic, archeological and biological anthropology. The psychological anthropology program also forges interdisciplinary links with other fields including psychiatry, cognitive science, psychology, and human development.

The program in psychological anthropology allows students to develop research projects focusing on person, self, and experience in cultural context. This focus of the program stresses the integration of approaches that have been developed within psychological anthropology and related fields. Students have the opportunity to pursue research interests in the areas of ethnopsychology, cultural psychology, and psychoanalytic anthropology, psychiatric anthropology, and phenomenological anthropology. The faculty teach students to develop a strong repertoire of research skills and theoretical concepts. The goal is to enable students to use anthropological concepts and methods to explore in depth the psychology of persons in culture and society.