Applying an anthropological perspective in health

We recently came across this interesting article about "Teaching medical students to challenge ‘unscientific’ racial categories." Anthropologists and other critical social scientists have long known that even though race is a social construction, it can have very real impacts in people's lives -- including in accessing health and healthcare.

This article explores how medical students continue to be taught to use racial stereotypes based in biology as shortcuts for diagnosing and treating illness. It also follows the work of Dr. Brooke Cunningham, a physician and sociologist, who challenges these harmful practices in teaching medicine. For Dr. Cunningham and others, the point of these reforms is to push medical students and future health professionals to think critically about race, and how these social categories impact individual health through lived experiences and structures of inequality.

“It’s not that race is irrelevant to health, but it’s not relevant to health because of innate differences. It’s relevant because racism affects people’s health.”

Although medical students are often repeatedly told throughout their education that race should be approached critically and understood as a social not biological construct, what's telling are the reactions of students to Cunningham's lecture based on the authority of medicine over social science:

Students who attended her recent lecture on race said Cunningham’s medical degree gave her added credibility.
“I think if she was just a social scientist, I would be more skeptical of whatever perspective she would bring to the conversation,” said Mac Garrett, a first-year medical student.

These insights raise some important questions to consider in how anthropologists and other social scientists might consider communicating their findings in applied contexts. How might we think about how social science evidence and arguments are interpreted by those we wish to influence, in order to be more persuasive? In order to create social change in applied contexts -- like medical students' training -- should we draw more on the the authority of critical social scientists who also have the clout of a medical degree?

Quick links and further reading:

• Teaching medical students to challenge ‘unscientific’ racial categories (10 March 2016, Stat)
• You might want to check out our links to anthropologists working in the health professions on our Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university page

Reading Lists for Decolonizing Anthropology & Beyond

One of the ways that anthropologists and other scholars have responded to recent world events -- from the systemic issues underlying the Black Lives Matter movement and Standing Rock, to Brexit and the rise of Trump -- has been in the classroom. Here is a (by no means exhaustive) list of some of the great resources for building a syllabus and classroom discussions around some of these current events. You can also check out our new page that has collected together various posts already published on our blog about reading lists and syllabi.

• The Decolonizing Anthropology series via Savage Minds, reflecting and building on the work of Faye Harrison, is a good place to start thinking about what it means to decolonize anthropology.
• In response to the recent events at Standing Rock, an interdisciplinary syllabus was created by the NYC Stands for Standing Rock committee "a group of Indigenous scholars and activists, and settler/ POC supporters": Standing Rock Syllabus
• Less a syllabus than a resource, the Native Voices: Native Peoples' Concepts of Health and Illness (U.S. National Library of Medicine) is an exhibition that "explores diverse Native Peoples’ concepts of health and illness, past and present." The site provides things like video interviews with indigenous healers, leaders, and biomedical professionals, as well as other activities and suggested readings.
• We've already posted about Anthropoliteia's #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus. This ongoing project is anthropology-focused.
• There's also the interdisciplinary The Black Lives Canada Syllabus (#BlackLivesCDNSyllabus) Google Doc for those looking for a little more CanCon.
• This Decolonising Science Reading List has been put together by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (#BlackandSTEM theoretical astro|physicist), where "You’ll find texts that range from personal testimony to Indigenous cosmology to anthropology, to history to sociology to education research. All are key to the process of decolonising science, which is a pedagogical, cultural, and intellectual set of interlocking structures, ideas, and practices."
• And lastly for this post, here is a Google Doc reading list of Ethnographic approaches to understanding Trump/Brexit/new rise of conservativism.

Is it good enough to think like an Anthropologist?

In recent weeks we've been posting about the use of anthropological tenets and ethnographic practices beyond traditional field sites. This topic was addressed from author Elizabeth Durham's perspective in a recent article post on Somatosphere (a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics), called  "The Good Enough Anthropologist"

In it, Durham speaks about the anthropological response to the recent Ebola outbreak and the push by diverse responders for anthropologists to take a culturalist perspective - e.g. what cultural practices might be undermining the Ebola response process - to help fight the epidemic.

Below is a pertinent quote from Durham's article although it doesn't include Durham's definition of the "good enough Anthropologist" or her conclusion:

As such, it suggests that anthropologists ought to expand our academic practice to encompass both research and better public relations: non-anthropological actors become good-enough anthropologists when we ourselves are not good enough at self-promotion, at clearly defining and communicating what it is we do, how we do it, and why we do it this way.

The issue of what constitutes “good anthropology” is, of course, controversial within anthropology: this is part of the issue, albeit an inevitable one. Moreover, while good-enough anthropology easily veers into culturalism, I can also admittedly see where it has the potential to foster a more democratic anthropology (though this is not the direction it has largely taken thus far), raising and/or reopening key questions similar to the one above. Who controls public anthropology, if anyone? What can or should “real” anthropologists do when faced with a public anthropology they may find dismaying? Is public anthropology an anthropology with a public presence, an anthropology practiced by publics, or both? Do attempts to trace such public afterlives aid the democratization of anthropology, or do they border on a way for scholars to reassert authority over the works they write? These are questions whose value lies more in discussion than in simple answers. 

Their article is worth a read as are the comments section. For example, Daniel Lendie writes:

But I think you are on the right track when you ask about our role as public anthropologists. For me, that can mean an effort to overcome our own focus on research and critical engagement to start to address questions that are relevant and immediate for others. We teach publicly all the time; we can apply that same anthropological approach that we use in the classroom to other arenas. But that means getting out of our comfort zones (our areas of deep expertise), and also having the institutional support for doing such work.

Finally, I’d push anthropologists to look closely at what we’d want instead of culturalism. We need a theory for this type of academic practice and engagement; just critiquing “culturalism” doesn’t do much to develop a viable way to add anthropology into the work around Ebola (and other public issues/problems) in a viable and satisfactory way. “Quick ethnography” might be a methodological way to do that, but we need a conceptual tool set for this type of work as well, one as much oriented to public and applied issues, to “How to?” sorts of questions.

Anthropology really seems everywhere these days - so where, if anywhere, are its limits?