Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology - Группа авторов - Страница 29

The named subdiscipline of medical anthropology has existed now for over 60 years. Its degree programs and textbooks have proliferated. However, and perhaps partly as a result, much present scholarship is in some ways redundant. For one thing, concepts and new bits of jargon delineated in popular publications are applied or repeated ad nauseam as others seeking to advance follow fashion. Take, for instance, “biological citizenship,” key to Adriana Petryna’s theorization of Chernobyl-injured Ukranians’ struggles with the state over access to health care and related resources (2002). Petryna’s work was part of a wave of innovative writing on biosociality (Rabinow’s term) that also spawned various other forms of corporeally anchored “citizenships.” By the end of the decade, however, the biocitizenship construct had, some said, lost its analytic power (Cooter 2008; and see Whyte 2009).

A second source of redundant scholarship in medical anthropology today is its magnitude. The literature is vastly more extensive now than a generation ago, making total command a real challenge. Concurrently, journal submission length limits have shrunk as publishers have had to economize (and to accommodate readers’ new habits), limiting the thoroughness of literature reviews. Sometimes areas of study, despite certain scholars’ insistence that they are brand new, have actually been scrutinized by many scholars previously.

Take, for example, hospital ethnography, which saw increased interest in the early 2000s. While those involved claimed that anthropologists were only just discovering the benefits of active research in hospital settings, Foster and Anderson devoted an entire chapter to hospitals in their 1978 textbook and included also a separate chapter on doctors and another on nurses. “Some of the most important studies of hospitals have been done by anthropologists,” they said (p. 164), such as one of the earliest behavioral science studies of nursing (this, in 1936). An early 1970s review of medical anthropology (Colson and Selby 1974) also provided a number of examples of this genre.

This is not to say that aims and approaches remain unchanged. Neither is it to deny that subtle differences can mean the world in terms of what publications contribute to the field, nor to ignore the heavy institutional pressures on scholars to stake claims of novel research (see Sobo et al. 2008). Yet a better grasp of the history of scholarship in a given topical area can support more efficient and effective theoretical advancement. Even this is not a new observation: It was in fact the point of many who, in the 1960s, took medical anthropology to task because “it has not been cumulative” (Scotch 1963, p. 39). Adding to the challenge today is medical anthropology’s success: It is a massive, noisy subdiscipline, whose various networks are not always or easily aware of each other, particularly when language barriers must be crossed (see Sailant and Genest 2007). Again, this problem is not new – but its significance has no doubt broadened as the field has grown.