Paper short abstract:

The process of negotiating hospital ethnographic research includes an ethics committee and various gatekeepers in several departments. Exposed are myriad ways in which biomedical practitioner power diverts, obfuscates and hinders an anthropological exploration into patient cultural diversity.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological studies of biomedicine often critique the medicalized dominance of western medicine versus other ethnomedicines, the healing practices of non-western societies or alternative therapies. Hospitals are viewed as 'islands' (Coser 1962) or liminal spaces (Turner 1977; van der Geest 2005; 2006; Livingstone 2012), and others that contain specialized clinical knowledge and practices - spaces in which patients have sojourns and return to 'normal life' or remain and progress to palliative care, followed by death (Long et al. 2008; Finkler et al. 2008). It is only in the last two decades that social scientists have fully engaged in or entered the biomedical domain (Fox 1980). The purpose of this paper is to comment on the process and subsequent machinations of negotiating an ethnographic research project in a tertiary level teaching hospital in Australia that includes an ethics committee and various gatekeepers in several departments. The paper exposes the myriad ways in which practitioner power in a biomedical model is used to divert, obfuscate and hinder an anthropological exploration into the cultural diversity of patients. There are examples of questionable professional behavior, time-lags, false notions of concern for patient safety, and seeming under enthusiasm for outsider research.