Article: Medical anthropology's epistemic sensibilities among health ethnographies
Catherine Trundle and Tarryn Phillips are collaborating to explore the often-tacit epistemic values of an anthropological ethnographic approach.
Our article Which Ethnography? Whose Ethnography? Medical anthropology's epistemic sensibilities among health ethnographies is forthcoming in the journal Medical Anthropology
Through a comparative review of health ethnographies, and autoethnographic observations from interdisciplinary research, we explore how anthropological ethnographies and health science ethnographies are founded on different epistemic sensibilities. Differences center on temporalities of research, writing processes, sites of social intervention, uses of theory, and analytic processes.
Understanding what distinguishes anthropological ethnography from health science ethnography enables medical anthropologists – who sometimes straddle these two ethnographic modes – to better articulate their epistemic positionality and facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations.