advancing popular but still largely untested theories (e.g., syndemics) with innovative methods (Brewis et al. 2020; Mendenhall and Singer 2020; Tomori et al. 2018)
This list, though incomplete, hints at how central methodological developments are to medical anthropology’s theoretical and practical significance. No single method defines us, and no method is exclusively ours. But the unifying commitment to ethnography as strategy – encompassing many techniques (Bernard 2018, p. 2) – is distinctive of the field. It’s what drives our relevance to the communities and collaborators with whom we work.
Our continued relevance will also depend on how we respond to this pivotal historical moment. Intersecting crises of COVID-19 and police violence against Black people in the United States forced many people to re-examine aspects of work and daily life that they previously took for granted. In addition, the abrupt halt to field research amid pandemic lockdowns led many anthropologists to seek ways of doing “anthropology from home” (Góralska 2020), to experiment with digital methods (Arya and Henn 2021; Podjed 2021), to intensify scrutiny of “the field” (Chambers 2020; Gross 2020), and to rethink relations between (sub)disciplines (Briggs 2020). Meanwhile, the momentary global awakening to violent anti-Blackness underscored the urgency of calls for an anthropology of white supremacy (Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2020), with attendant questions about epistemology, method, and the construction of the canon (Blakey 2020; Smalls et al. 2021; Smith and Garrett-Scott 2021; Tuhiwai Smith 2021; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008).
It is not yet clear how these developments will play out; the next several years will be telling. We would do well to recognize how central research methods and research design are to the pressing questions ahead.
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