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Accepted Paper:
You cannot take the researcher out of the evaluator: epistemology and ethics of anthropological collaborations in public health
Susana Carro-Ripalda
(University of the Basque Country and Independent Researcher)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the epistemological and ethical boundaries between evaluations of public health programmes and anthropological knowledge. It explores the limitations in the production of "knowledge" in the context of differing intentionalities, and the ethical quandaries involved in turning an "anthropological gaze" on professional partners.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the epistemological and ethical boundaries, continuities and ruptures which lay between the tasks of carrying out interdisciplinary and collaborative evaluations of public health programmes and producing anthropological knowledge. Through the example of an ethnographic evaluation of a tobacco control programme carried out by academic anthropologists, the paper explores the difficulties implicit in negotiating the very notion of "knowledge" between interdisciplinary and non-academic partners (who might conceive it as "evidence" or "data") and the epistemological limitations -and perhaps liberations- imposed to the form and nature of such "knowledge" by differing intentionalities: is this, or can it ever be, anthropological knowledge? At the same time, the paper investigates the ethical quandaries involved in turning collaborators into objects of investigation themselves, and interrogates the inevitability and appropriateness of applying an "anthropological gaze" to all our professional undertakings: are we what we do, or can we mould what we do to serve other (public) purposes?