Paper short abstract:

In a comparison of experiences from Denmark and Italy, relations between medicine and anthropology in public health are discussed. Can anthropology balance reconfiguring problems and offering solutions? Issues of medical formation, embodiment and the right to health are at the core of this paper.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will compare examples of ethnographic engagement in the public health field in Denmark and Italy. The authors claim that ethnographic practice should no more be considered as a method belonging exclusively to the medical anthropologist but it could be a sharable tool, a key practice for expressing a common agency both in the scientific and the public field in collaboration between medicine and anthropology. The stress is on the importance of dialogue and shared practices between anthropologists and physicians beginning during education. Recent European people's advocacies for health care as a "common good" are an attempt of counteract against the social-economic decline of the right to health in welfare societies. How do ethnographers and physician react to such a crisis in the two countries? Is the old quarrel on reductionism still an obstacle for dialogue or not? If the vocation of anthropologists consists in reconfiguring problems more that offering solutions how can this approach help the collaboration between physicians and ethnographers in the public health field? These are some of the questions to which the authors try to provide answers based on experiences with ethnography in the public health field in Denmark and Italy. Issues of medical formation, embodied knowledge health economy and the right to health are at the core of this comparative approach.