Paper short abstract:

The idea of using anthropological research methods has influenced Thai HIV/AIDS research. However, interdisciplinary collaborations have muted anthropologists' contribution to AIDS research, and the borrowing of anthropological methods by other disciplines has failed to produce quality research.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on data from the Thai and other Southeast Asian HIV/AIDS epidemics I argue that medical anthropology and anthropology in general have played only very minor roles in the modelling of these epidemics and in the development and implementation of AIDS interventions. However, the idea of anthropological research and of the use of anthropological research methods such as ethnography has played an important role in the construction of the Thai and other regional AIDS epidemics and in AIDS interventions.

The fact that anthropologists have increasingly been finding employment in public health research and allied fields, has been viewed as a triumph for the discipline and, perhaps too, as a gift-horse whose limitations and deficiencies should not be examined too closely. Also, other disciplines are increasingly borrowing anthropological concepts and/or research methods, and at a time when the discipline has been under threat in universities some anthropologists have found comfort in this fact.

However, I suggest, that it is time to examine the limitations imposed on anthropological research in interdisciplinary collaborations, and the quality of research in other disciplines which claim to be influenced by anthropology. I argue that the epistemological and other limitations imposed on anthropological research in multidisciplinary collaborations often reduce anthropologists to little more than culture brokers and taxonomists - collectors and interpreters of exotica - an ironic (if largely unnoticed) return to the discipline's nineteenth-century roots, and that when other disciplines draw on anthropological research techniques the outcome is often merely "anthropology lite".