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Short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic materials from several projects studying public health in Switzerland, I imagine what a mundane story of “health inequalities” might look like and explore how renouncing to big stories of “inequalities” to tell them in a minor mode may help to conceptualize them differently.

Long abstract:

« Big stories » about ‘health inequalities’ abound in public health. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic concerns about rising inequalities and health equity burgeoned with calls to prevent them and pay specific attention to groups of the population considered to be vulnerable socially and/or medically. In the aftermath of this health crisis, various accounts of the pandemic, stemming from epidemiology, but also from social sciences, reassert that it affected more those who are already made more vulnerable structurally (Manderson, Burke, and Wahlberg 2021; Fassin and Fourcade 2022). However, the iterative multiplication of big stories of inequalities tend to distract the attention from the multiple “mundane” ways through which “inequalities” are made and remade in daily life. Drawing on ethnographic materials from several projects exploring the world of public health in Switzerland, I aim to imagine what a mundane story of “health inequalities” might look like. By doing so, this paper explores how looking at “health inequalities” through the ethnographic lens of the mundane helps us to conceptualize them differently. It will shed light on what shifts when one renounces to big stories and categories of health inequalities and question what is lost and gained through this move to a minor mode.