Paper short abstract:

This paper juxtaposes the cosmopolitan discourse of multi/inter/ trans with a street-level account of being an anthropologist within a health research centre.

Paper long abstract:

My disciplinary background rests in anthropology. Yet more than two decades after gaining my PhD in medical anthropology I am in an organisational sense yet to work 'in anthropology'. Instead I have been employed in health faculties predominantly populated by 'other' disciplines with whom I collaborate on a daily basis. I have often been the only anthropologist on staff or one of a handful. As I negotiate my disciplinary presence in this space, I experience both difference and sameness. Is my difference evidence of maintaining the integrity of my discipline in the face of the mostly positivist, essentialist disciplines of discovery which surround me, or perhaps I have failed in my accidental quasi-ethnographic journey among 'other' disciplines. Is my sameness a sign of becoming tainted by my associations with disciplinary 'others' or perhaps I occupy a cosmopolitan scholarship beyond the discipline silos? In what sense have I become or unbecome an anthropologist? In this paper I reflect on the role of anthropology among the health disciplines and critique the pluralist discourse of multi/inter/trans within the contemporary neo-liberal academy. In particular, I reflect on my street-level experience of membership of a health research centre based on 'interdisciplinary partnerships between health and biomedical scientists' and ponder the challenges and opportunities of these partnerships.