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- Convenors:
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Marie Thérèse Voerman
(Erasmus Medical Centre)
Simona Maisano (University for Foreigners of Siena)
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- Chair:
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Matteo Valoncini
(University of Bologna)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how early-career scholars in medical anthropology inherit, negotiate, and challenge the discipline’s intellectual legacies, balancing continuity with rupture in re-imagining health, care, and epistemic futures.
Long Abstract
In recent decades, medical anthropology has built on seminal works and theoretical frameworks that continue to shape research on health, care, and power. While these foundations provide critical tools, they also risk reproducing epistemic assumptions, disciplinary power-relations and norms rooted in colonial, Western or institutional legacies.
This panel invites early- and mid-career scholars to reflect on the metaphor of “standing on the shoulders of giants”: how do we inherit, negotiate, and (re)work these intellectual legacies in contemporary anthropological work on medicine, health systems, multilingual care settings, and epistemic justice? We seek contributions that explore questions such as: What does it mean to build on classics while avoiding mere reproduction of disciplinary orthodoxies? How do researchers address the tension between continuity (using recognized frameworks) and rupture (decolonising, re-imagining, subverting)? How do these tensions play out in fieldwork, empirical analysis, theorisation, and publication?
Empirical papers, methodological reflections and conceptual essays are all welcome, especially those showing how medical anthropology engages with intersectional power, multilingual/multi-cultural care, epistemic futures, and modes of collaboration that challenge established hierarchies. By bringing together diverse voices, the panel aims to generate a collective discussion on how the next generation of medical anthropologists can shape epistemic futures, informed by the past, but not constrained by its blind spots.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Medical anthropologists have made contributions to the medical professions by introducing the concept of cultural competence. However, this has led to the culturalization of difference in care, which this abstract argues we now need to reckon with.
Paper long abstract
In the 1980s, medical anthropologists such as Arthur Kleinman introduced cultural competence – based on ideas about culture prevalent in anthropology at the time – to care workers. This fostered a shift away from the (false) universalism favored in the medical world.
Through ethnographic fieldwork in a self-identified ‘multicultural’ adult day service in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, I observed how the idea of cultural competence has made its way into care discourses and practices. Like Kleinman in the early 2000s, I noticed how it has unsettled assumptions about universalism in care but has at times fed into a static conception of culture. However, I also encountered care workers who contested static conceptions of culture, reflecting on the idea that cultures change and are not necessarily internally coherent. This could be taken as a success of innovations driven by Kleinman and colleagues.
Yet, even less static conceptions of culture arguably uphold the culturalization of difference in care. Although ideas about what culture is and how it should be apprehended in care differ from the early days of cultural competence, culture remains seen as the defining axis of difference driving the need to address diversity in care. I observed how this contributed to othering along the lines of racial hierarchies in the adult day service. Still, a return to universalism seems equally likely to contribute to racial hierarchies. I propose that decolonial critiques in/of anthropology offer a way to make sense of this moment in care and find a balance between the two.
Paper short abstract
Technocratic logics and process management are displacing medical knowledge as the structural bases of many healthcare institutions. We argue this shift has deadening effects on both research and care, and call for anthropology that melds experience of bureaucratic governance with lively critique.
Paper long abstract
Medical anthropologists conducting fieldwork today encounter challenges of access and ethical approvals set by increasingly technocratic healthcare institutions. While clinical governance processes act on ethnographers wherever they seek to enter clinical settings, the work of ‘giants’ in medical anthropology often edits out the frictions of access. Drawing on our experiences navigating bureaucracies to access English NHS hospitals as field-sites, and our subsequent fieldwork in an NHS an inpatient psychiatric ward and emergency department, we consider the significance of bureaucracy within changing medical institutions.
We argue that the displacement of medical knowledge by technocratic specialisation and process optimisation (as related to ‘patient flow’, risk assessment, and referral ‘pathways’, for example) necessitates a new kind of medical anthropologist: one capable of writing evocatively from positions of entrapment in the bureaucratic mesh that risk creating ‘dead zones of the imagination’ (Graeber 2012) for clinicians and ethnographers alike. In our analysis, we ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ adjacent to medical anthropology - including Graeber and Navarro-Yashin - as well as contemporary writers who have inspired us in ways personal and academic. As healthcare becomes increasingly modularised and mediated by uncaring technologies, a new generation of medical anthropologists can move past poetics of knowledge, power, and actor-network theory to more closely align experience and analysis, and propose more human ways to animate healthcare's ‘dead zones’.
Paper short abstract
This theoretical paper examines how healthcare professionals’ symbolic boundaries shape diagnostic processes in codeine use. Blurred distinctions between medical and non-medical use show that class, age, and gender influence judgments, highlighting the need to rethink diagnostic process.
Paper long abstract
Symbolic boundaries are classificatory tools through which individuals and groups make sense of social reality and draw distinctions that shape legitimacy and access to resources. Studies of psychoactive substance use have largely concentrated on boundaries constructed by users themselves, while far less attention has been paid to the boundary work carried out by healthcare professionals and its role in defining categories of use.
This theoretical paper addresses issues around over-the-counter codeine use in Poland, which are particularly relevant in this context. Codeine, often perceived as a ‘weak’ opioid, may be downplayed by some healthcare professionals. At the same time, professionals likely hold assumptions about what an ‘addicted’ person looks like compared with someone taking medication as prescribed. Medical and non-medical codeine use often overlap, making attempts to clearly separate them unstable and potentially misleading. These symbolic boundaries, constructed by healthcare professionals, can be stigmatizing, shaping judgments about who ‘deserves’ help and complicating binary classifications such as ‘addicted’ and ‘non-addicted.’ Understanding these boundaries is important for revealing how professionals perceive different types of codeine users and how these perceptions influence diagnostic and treatment practices.
The analysis further explores how professional judgments may rely less on observable patterns of use and more on classed, age-based, or socio-economic cues. By shifting attention from users’ narratives to professional practices of classification, the paper proposes a theoretical framework for critically examining the symbolic criteria that underpin diagnostic processes and questions whether existing conceptual models are sufficient to capture these dynamics.
Paper short abstract
This paper questions the adequacy of Turner’s concept of liminality for chronic illnesses like eating disorders, where treatment and self-management resemble prolonged transformation. Drawing on Rebecca Lester, Karin Eli, and my own research, it explores how liminality is redefined in this context.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I will question the adequacy of Victor Turner’s classical concept of “liminality” in the context of long-term, chronic processes of illness and treatment. Liminality, understood as a temporary transitional phase leading to reintegration, proves inadequate for understanding eating disorders, which are often chronic and recurrent. The processes of treatment and ongoing self-management resemble a prolonged transformation rather than a discrete rite of passage. I will examine the approaches of scholars such as Rebecca J. Lester and Karin Eli, who demonstrate how the classical notion of liminality is complicated and redefined in studies of eating disorders. This analysis allows for a deeper understanding of the complexity of chronic illness from an anthropological perspective. I will also draw on my own reflections related to research design in my doctoral studies, focusing on the experiences of individuals with eating disorders.
Paper short abstract
This paper revisits medical anthropology’s critique of global mental health as an inherited legacy. It asks how critique itself has become epistemic authority, and explores emerging approaches that move beyond binary toward more reflexive and collaborative forms of knowledge production.
Paper long abstract
This paper offers a conceptual reflection on medical anthropology’s early critical engagement with global mental health (GMH) and argues that the critique itself has become an object in need of re-examination. Since the emergence of the GMH movement around two decades ago, medical anthropology has produced a substantial body of critical scholarship examining its assumptions and modes of knowledge production.
A first wave of GMH critique exposed the field’s colonial epistemic hierarchies, manifested in the universalisation of Western psychiatric knowledge, and continues to shape anthropological perspectives to this day. Yet, these early works contributed to establishing a dominant mode of critique that relied on binary framings of global/local and universal/specific, at times essentialising local knowledge and healing practices as pure alternatives to Western psychiatry – perhaps contributing to what Sa’ed Atshan calls an “empire of critique,” where critique itself becomes a form of epistemic power.
As Dörte Bemme’s recent work shows, GMH has become increasingly reflexive and participatory, challenging medical anthropology to re-examine its once politically relevant critical tradition. Standing on the shoulders of earlier critics, a new generation of anthropologists working on GMH is increasingly moving beyond oppositional, binary critique towards more collaborative and self-reflective practices of knowledge production. This requires maintaining critical sensitivity to power while reimagining critique as a collaborative and conversational practice in shaping epistemic futures.