Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I consider who we are doing medical anthropology for, and how our thought and practice might more meaningfully reach beyond the academic spaces within which our representations of bodies and health so often become circumscribed - towards a more public and engaged medical anthropology

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I reflect on: Who are we doing medical anthropology for? Who has access to the representations we produce, and who is benefitting from them? How might our thought and practice meaningfully reach beyond the academic spaces within which our representations of bodies and health so often become circumscribed - towards a more public and engaged medical anthropology? To answer these questions, I first consider how hegemonic ways of knowing in both biomedical and anthropological thought/practice interact with one another to shape and constrict the ways in which bodies and health/illness are un/re-made and ultimately delivered back to the people with whom we study, other researchers/practitioners, and general publics. In particular, I attend to the lingering presence of entrenched dualities and circumscriptions in both fields, including: epistemological distinctions between the body as known/object and knower/subject (Bichat; Sullivan 1996; Mol 2002); analytical distinctions between the body as inscribed/acted upon (representational approaches) and lived/active (phenomenological approaches) (Crossley 1996; Csordas 1994); and methodological divisions between ‘field’ (where ‘being in the world’ happens) and ‘desk’ (where ‘knowing about the world’ happens) (Chua and Mathur 2018; Mosse 2016). I then explore ways in which we might hold these dualities in tension with one another or collapse them in order to co-produce representations of bodies and health that are legible/recognisable and have affective, alleviatory, and perhaps even emancipatory potential for fellow researchers/practitioners of bodies and health, and most importantly, for the communities whose very bodies and health we engage.