Amid growing legalization, cannabis in culture and politics is the focus of this anthropology course
Whenever I taught my medical anthropology course, I noticed that students were most curious about the section of the course that deals with the uses of plants, fungi and other species for a range of medical purposes. Those purposes included healing, psychological well-being, ritual and spiritual awakening, to name a few. Once Connecticut, the state where I work, legalized recreational cannabis, I decided it was timely to take the plant section from the original course and expand it to a 14-week course of its own. It was also an opportunity to introduce students to the discipline of anthropology through a topic I knew many of them found interesting. I decided to focus on cannabis instead of the entire panoply of plants and other species, since it was the one plant being legalized in the state at that time. Throughout the course, we focus on the different cultural and political significance of cannabis in other geographical contexts. We look at the representation of cannabis in art,...
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