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Paper short abstract:

A comparison between the roles 'methods' play in anthropology, allopathic research and Traditional Chinese Medicine reveals important overlaps and differences. Prospective anthropological methods, being most dependent on the active participation of the researched, should be renamed 'preparations'.

Paper long abstract:

In allopathic medical research, ‘methods’ are designed to be replicable, with the aim of cancelling out subjective bias and precipitating objective fact. Sandwiched between researching subjects and knowable objects, methods themselves are not usually thought to have any substantive, ontological reality. They are merely the means to objective knowledge. In contrast, methods, as diagnostic processes in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) are important in their own right: the (variable) ways in which bodies are known are not subordinated to ‘the body’ as a knowable object. Patients of TCM often celebrate rather than criticise different methods being used to diagnose the same condition. In anthropology, broadly replicable methods- observing, participating, ‘being with’ (Driessen et al. 2021)- are valued for their potential to produce different results. Indeed, this is the whole premise of the discipline as a comparative endeavour. However, if the anthropologist often does research using the ‘same’ participant-observation methods, the success of these methods also depends on the co-participation of research participants, such that anthropologists only provide half of the methodology in practice. The always-different co-participation in, and production of, ethnographic fieldwork methods by participants is what produces the anthropological sense that life is different from one place to the next. In their reliance on the methodological co-participation of others, anthropological methods revealingly overlap with both TCM and allopathic approaches. Given that any anthropological research proposal only ever provides (at most) half of the actual methodology to be ethnographically employed, what are often called ‘methods’, I suggest, should be renamed ‘preparations’.