Paper short abstract:

This paper draws from experiences working for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in a number of countries, and during the course of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, to illuminate the fraught and contested application of anthropological approaches in medical humanitarian practice.

Paper long abstract:

The ascendency of an anthropology for medical humanitarian action is now regularly charted in relation to the 2013-2016 “West African” Ebola outbreak. The visibility of a particular brand of applied anthropology during the course of this outbreak lends credence to the suggestion that this period marked a turning point for the discipline, with the widespread legitimation of anthropological insights by historically quantitatively driven global public health and humanitarian communities of practice.

What this narrative serves to overlook are the multitude of recorded filovirus outbreaks that preceded 2013, a long history of outbreaks attributable to other pathogens, such as HIV, and other non-pathogenic health emergencies. Abstracting anthropology in health emergencies from this longer history reinforces two implicit assumptions. The first is to imply that there was a remarkable novelty to the combination of virus, context and human behaviour in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia that necessitated a uniquely comprehensive engagement from anthropologists. The second assumption is to present the application of anthropology in health emergencies as a contemporary phenomenon, for which advances have seemingly occurred rapidly with uncomplicated institutional and sectoral uptake and integration.

This paper will explore some of the institutional cultures and practices that hinder the more comprehensive application of anthropological insights to humanitarian response. This paper will further argue that the oppositional nature of anthropological values and approaches to those embedded in mainstream humanitarian praxis requires that “insider” anthropologists adopt a more productively disruptive role in relation to their medical and operational counterparts.