Last night I was on a wonderful panel organized by my colleague, Judy Taylor. The panel was part of an ongoing "Qualitative Research in Reflection" series. All of the panelists were asked to reflect on "Things I Wish I Hadn't Learned" while doing fieldwork. We all shared funny, sad, and challenging stories from our collective fieldwork. I was honored to share the stage with my U of T colleague, Neda Maghbouleh, and Jessica Fields (SFSU) who does interesting work on gender and sexuality. I walked away from the panel feeling invigorated and excited about being an ethnographer again.
The session then transitioned into a Q&A period and then my colleague Luisa Schwartzman asked, "What can sociology learn from other disciplines that do ethnography? What can sociology learn from Anthropology?"
I didn't have a good answer for this at first, but then I thought back to my time in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars. I remembered meeting medical anthropologists who were dually invested in theorizing their data and helping people. As a sociologist, I wasn't exposed to this type of thinking. I was always under the impression that my first duty as a social scientist was to do good research. "Intervention and policy analyses aren't in my expertise," I'd tell myself.
My time in the Health & Society Scholars changed how I feel about this. In addition to medical anthropologists, I met economists, epidemiologists, public health researchers, and many others moved by the same mission: Do rigorous work and intervene! This was perhaps the most enduring lesson from my time as a Health & Society Scholar and it's something that I try to pass onto my students.
It's a shame that "helping others" is sometimes seen as a stigma in sociology. I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but I hope that we can change this. Why should wanting to help people be seen as a knock on one's scientific rigor? Why do many social scientists compartmentalize intervention-oriented work? Is it enough to just be a witness to poverty and suffering?
I believe that everyone has a choice to do the kind of work that inspires them. Not all social science is political or aimed at health interventions. And that's fine. The field is large enough to accommodate and support many different approaches and projects.
But, for those of us who study poverty and its many effects on vulnerable populations, why not try to make a difference in people's lives? Why not take a page from the playbook of someone like Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist/physician at Harvard (Partners in Health), who writes about "structural violence" and is on the front lines of the global HIV epidemic treating people, getting clinics built, and being an advocate for health care as a human right?
As ethnographers, we are able to see and access parts of people's lives that are mostly invisible to social scientists who rely on other methods. Ethnography is valuable precisely because it allows the researcher to get close to a community and learn firsthand about their troubles and daily dilemmas.
I think we can learn a lot from medical anthropologists. Maybe the most important thing is that we should be unapologetic about trying to help people.
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| Paul Farmer talks the talk and walks the walk |
I didn't have a good answer for this at first, but then I thought back to my time in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars. I remembered meeting medical anthropologists who were dually invested in theorizing their data and helping people. As a sociologist, I wasn't exposed to this type of thinking. I was always under the impression that my first duty as a social scientist was to do good research. "Intervention and policy analyses aren't in my expertise," I'd tell myself.
My time in the Health & Society Scholars changed how I feel about this. In addition to medical anthropologists, I met economists, epidemiologists, public health researchers, and many others moved by the same mission: Do rigorous work and intervene! This was perhaps the most enduring lesson from my time as a Health & Society Scholar and it's something that I try to pass onto my students.
It's a shame that "helping others" is sometimes seen as a stigma in sociology. I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but I hope that we can change this. Why should wanting to help people be seen as a knock on one's scientific rigor? Why do many social scientists compartmentalize intervention-oriented work? Is it enough to just be a witness to poverty and suffering?
I believe that everyone has a choice to do the kind of work that inspires them. Not all social science is political or aimed at health interventions. And that's fine. The field is large enough to accommodate and support many different approaches and projects.
But, for those of us who study poverty and its many effects on vulnerable populations, why not try to make a difference in people's lives? Why not take a page from the playbook of someone like Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist/physician at Harvard (Partners in Health), who writes about "structural violence" and is on the front lines of the global HIV epidemic treating people, getting clinics built, and being an advocate for health care as a human right?
I think we can learn a lot from medical anthropologists. Maybe the most important thing is that we should be unapologetic about trying to help people.
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