I am grateful for the opportunity to deliver a keynote lecture at the virtual conference organized by the Medical Anthropology Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute, “Mobilising Methods in Medical Anthropology.” I was particularly glad to share my work in this venue, as the conference theme draws together multiple strands of my research and teaching.
The video recording remains available for registered attendees of the conference. For others, the abstract is below. My thanks to the conference organizers!
Boundary Making and Boundary Crossing in Medical Anthropology: Methods at the Intersections
Medical anthropology is an expansive field: at once a humanistic and scientific enterprise that crosses (sub)disciplinary boundaries, values multiple ways of knowing, appreciates both basic and applied research, and encompasses the human condition across time and space. This holistic and integrative approach is medical anthropology’s distinctive strength. It also poses a challenge in delineating the range of research methods relevant to the field: Medical anthropologists draw on the whole toolkit of social science, and many also integrate methods from the humanities, public health, biomedicine, and the life sciences. The discipline’s location at so many intersections presents both pitfalls and promise.
In this talk, I sketch a vision of medical anthropology that relishes its role at the intersections and argue for a methodological approach that crosses rather than erects boundaries. I challenge the constraints of three common boundaries in particular: between qualitative and quantitative, social and biological, and researcher and researched. To illustrate the value of transcending these boundaries I draw on collaborative, mixed-methods, biocultural research on health inequities among racialized populations in the Americas—before, during, and likely after the COVID-19 pandemic. I draw attention to the ways that mobilising boundary-crossing methods both contributes to core theoretical interests of medical anthropology and resolves seemingly intractable problems in medicine, public health, and the broader health sciences.