In 1993, the Four Corners region of the Southwestern United States experienced an unknown virus outbreak that killed its victims within 48 hours. While the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) turned to biomedical science to understand the mysterious virus, the affected Indigenous community turned to their own history. Ultimately, Navajo oral history offered answers that streamlined the research process and …
Tag Archives: Applied Anthropology
Emergent Anthropology: Reimagining U.S. Medical Anthropology in Theory and Practice
This article is part of the series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
The American Anthropological Association website identifies four subfields of anthropology (archaeology, biological, cultural, linguistic) and reserves a separate section for “applied and practicing anthropology.” In our collective experience, we have found this division between ostensibly “academic” and “applied” anthropology problematic, as it limits the possibilities of a broadly conceptualized and enacted medical anthropology that is more continuous than categorical. We …
Doing and Seeing: Cultivating a “Fractured Habitus” through Reflexive Clinician Ethnography
This article is part of the series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
Introduction
The tension between critical theoretical innovation and on-the-ground, practical application has animated intense debate in medical anthropology (Scheper-Hughes 1990). Epistemological and methodological conflicts cropping up at the intersection of medicine and anthropology, though central considerations for all medical anthropologists, represent an inescapable source of tension for MD/PhD clinician-ethnographers. While innovative manuscripts produced by such scholars (Wendland 2019) have illustrated …
The Thinness of Care: The Promise of Medical Anthropology in MD/PhD Training
This article is part of the series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
In the mid-twentieth century, recognizing the growing need for innovations born of clinical experience, pathways for training MD-PhD physician-scientists emerged in the hopes that this hybrid training could produce novel insights into disease and ultimately, treatments. In the years since formal MD/PhD training programs were established, a growing number of institutions have established pathways for a combination with non-traditional disciplines, …
Working in a Fracture Zone: Learning to Research Mental Health from Multiple Cultures
This article is part of the series: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World
We are an ensemble cast. As such, it is perhaps appropriate that one of the first places where we all came together as a team had at one point been a set for a Canadian television show. Now the buildings are owned by the First Nations, an Anishinaabek community, with whom we were partnered. We came together through a series …
COVID-19 and The Lessons Anthropology Learned from HIV/AIDS
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
On April 24, 1980, Ken Horne, a San Francisco resident, was reported to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) as a young man suffering with an old man’s disease, Kaposi’s sarcoma. Subsequently, in 1981, the CDC identified Horne as the first patient in the US of what would (in 1982) come to be called AIDS. By June 5, 1981, a …