Newsletter: September 2001
Ann Miles and Fred Bloom Co-Contributing Editors
Methods on My Mind
Bill Dressler (Alabama)
As I write this, I’m sitting in my apartment in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, a city of about half a million in the northern part of the state of São Paulo. I’ve been working for a little over six weeks, getting started what will be a 3-year project on social and cultural dimensions of cardiovascular disease risk. Needless to say, I’ve got methods on my mind, since I’m in the process of continuing my work on the integration of ethnographic methods and epidmiologic methods.
But there are other good reasons for my state of mind. I’m approaching the last few months of my SMA presidency. In November I’ll become Past-President, doing what Mark Nichter tells me to, so I’m thinking back over the past couple of years. I’ve tried to do a little to reinforce connections that the SMA has with the major health research funding agencies in the U.S., namely the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. We participated strongly in an NIH conference last year; we’ve had some very productive (and concretely profitable) sessions on grant-writing at our annual meetings; we have planned a strong program in this regard at the upcoming AAA meeting; and, in the Spring of 2002 we will be meeting jointly with the Society for Applied Anthropology in Atlanta, where we hope to organize activities jointly with the CDC.
What’s the point of this? Frankly, I want anthropology to have more seats at the table on a national level when it comes to health research. I guess that I’m a little sensitive to this because, over the years, I have found myself more than once in the position of being what seemed like the “token” anthropologist at conferences on cardiovascular disease risk, as many of you in other areas (reproductive health, aging, and others) have no doubt found yourselves. On the one hand, what we have written appeals to researchers in other areas. On the other hand, there is often a multidisciplinary subtext in these conferences, hence the need to get at least one anthropologist in there.
What impact, however, does medical anthropology really have? Certainly people take notice, at least in the moment. But I get the queasy feeling that the impact is mostly momentary, that there is little lasting effect on the thinking of our fellow health researchers. Why? My fear in this regard is that in medical anthropology we don’t have the body of research that other areas have—and this is the important part—that has been carried out with a set of research methods that can be read across disciplines.
My old Prof., Bert Pelto (I come by my obsession with methods honestly, after all), once remarked that we don’t really learn anthropology so much as we hang around long enough to absorb a good bit of it. From a conceptual standpoint, I think that is true of just about any social science discipline. To understand what a health psychologist really means by “attributions,” for example, I think one needs to hang around psychology for a long time. But that usually doesn’t interfere with our ability to read a study in health psychology, figure out what people did in the study, and make some sense out of their findings.
My fear is that in anthropology, our research methods continue to be too obscure, idiosyncratic, and hidden from the reader (or listener). And no matter what our theoretical orientation might be, it is virtually impossible to divorce what we’ve found from how we’ve gone about looking at it.
So, my point is, if we want more seats at that table, we need to be able to communicate more clearly what it is we’re doing. The impact we have will depend on our ability, collectively, to carry forward a health research agenda that includes the continuing refinement of public, replicable research methods.
SMA and SfAA 2002 Meeting in Atlanta
Ruthbeth Finerman (Memphis)
The Society for Medical Anthropology will hold an exciting meeting in conjunction with the Society for Applied Anthropology in Atlanta in 2002! This gathering will be special. In addition to the traditional range of medical anthropology sessions at the SfAA meetings, the SMA will hold an independent plenary session and series of panels tailored to feature cutting edge work within and beyond the discipline. The SMA portion of the meeting will begin on Wednesday, with a plenary session for all participants. During this session, a range of distinguished speakers will explore the dynamics of individual and institutional agency in relation to major health issues. The plenary will be followed by a reception for our membership.
Following the plenary, there will be special sessions interwoven throughout the SfAA Meeting, focusing on similar themes within medical anthropology. Members of the SMA Board will organize these sessions. As always, the SMA also welcomes active participation of medical anthropologists in the main SfAA program, through volunteered papers, posters, and sessions. Discussions are on-going for special joint SfAA and SMA sessions for the meeting. Keep your eyes posted on the SMA column and the SMA and SfAA websites for further information.
To submit to this column, contact Ann Miles at miles@wmich.edu.