Your research essay proposal needs to be no more 1 page in length and needs to include a brief description of what you are going to be exploring and a list of at least 5 briefly annotated bibliographic preliminary sources.

This project will provide you with an opportunity to research a particular disease/illness, and to evaluate it from an anthropological perspective, with reference to the literature and concepts we will discuss over the term. Once you have chosen the focus of your project, you are expected to do some outside literature review. However, this paper is not meant to be an exhaustive history of your chosen object of study. Rather, I ask that you write a critical analysis of how this disease/illness have been culturally constructed and represented (in the medical and anthropological literature, in popular media, in advertising, in policy, etc.). How have therapies or afflictions been “marked”, in a social/cultural sense, over time? (How) have these perceptions changed? Why? What makes a particular disease/illness a social stigma, or a badge of strength or honor?

In general terms, critical analysis involves various ways of taking ownership of the information you encounter by registering your active engagement with that information. This can be done in a number of ways, including placing it into some broader context (e.g., historical, social, cultural, political, economic, regional, global, or theoretical), breaking it down into underlying assumptions, assessing the perspective from which it is coming, relating it to other information or experiences from outside the class, comparing and contrasting the ideas or findings that were presented by different sources, synthesizing different pieces of the puzzle into a new combination, offering new examples that illustrate a point made, questioning the logic or evidential support of points that were made, questioning the way in which an idea or culture or practice was represented, finding contradictions between different statements made, tracing the broader significance or implications, and/or raising additional related questions, etcetera. You probably can‟t do all of these sorts of critical analysis in one paper, and you are not expected to. Doing a few is fine. Look over the broad topics we have discussed in class and think about your topic in the terms. You can organize your research paper under these headings, for example, Gender, Religion, Race and Class (or which ever topics you find interesting or most relevant).