Before and after fieldwork: ingredients for an ethnography of illness

Abstract

W.H.R. Rivers asked what light anthropology could throw on the emergence of medicine. But this early lead was not soon followed up. Social anthropology had first to establish itself. The new social anthropology championed holistic fieldwork in small-scale societies. Some did choose to study illness or misfortune ethnographically. Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner and Max Marwick provided outstanding models in this field. Political change and decolonisation made some of the older assumptions about the place and aims of anthropological research less easy to sustain. Growth in the subject encouraged specialisation. Medical anthropology was one among many possible developments. But it also had to identify a distinctive focus and place in relation to medicine and other health-related social studies.

Keywords:

• W.H.R. Rivers
• religion and healing
• ethnography of illness
• identifying a subject
• early teaching and research in UK
• relations with medicine and sociology

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the editors, the anonymous referees, Stephen Kunitz, Murray Last and Jerome Lewis for helpful suggestions.

The paper was presented at the conference ‘Medical Anthropology in Europe’ funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Anthropological Institute.

Conflict of Interest: none.

Notes

1. Rivers latterly became influenced by Perry and Elliot Smith's views on the spread of cultural traits by diffusion from an original centre – their ‘hyperdiffusionist’ version proposed ancient Egypt as the original source of civilisation (Rivers 1924, vi–vii, 90,106; Firth 1978, 238).

2. For three years from 1956, Raymond Firth chaired a seminar at the London School of Economics on medical anthropology, seeking partly to make clearer what role there might be for anthropology in relation to public health.

3. The contribution to medical anthropology of people with South African experience is striking: J. Cassell, Jean Comaroff, Meyer Fortes, Cecil Helman, M. Gelfand, S.L. Kark, Joe Loudon, Harriet Ngubane, M.W. Susser.

4. ‘Health’ is the unmarked member of a linguistic pair. ‘Health’ may include ‘illness’ (e.g. ‘health statistics’, the question ‘How's your health?’) but not the reverse – ‘illness’ does not include ‘health’. That markedness fits the way people take health for granted, but illness makes them stop and think.

5. In 1931, Sir Henry Wellcome instituted an annual medal for ‘applied anthropology’. It continued until 1966 then lapsed. In 1977 the Wellcome Trust agreed with the Royal Anthropological Institute to revive it biennially, but with narrowed scope.