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Engaging Ethnographic Methods in Critical Biocultural Health Research
Over the past several decades, one important growing trend in critical biocultural studies of health has been a stronger engagement with ethnographic methods. The degree to which recent biocultural health studies work to integrate ethnography with biological indicators such as blood spots and other biomarkers makes connections between the biological and social worlds ever more legible (Hoke 2020; Sweet et al. 2018; Tallman 2018). A number of sociocultural medical anthropologists have employed the uses of similar biomarkers and situated their work in biocultural frameworks (Jernigan 2018; Mendenhall 2019; Oths 1998; Seligman 2014; Weaver 2018). Among others, Singer et al. (2017), Singer (2020), and Mendenhall (2019) have led the way in developing syndemics as a biosocial concept important to public health and medical sciences as well as medical anthropology.
Some of the more richly ethnographically grounded studies draw heavily on the use of narrative and meaning to breathe life into otherwise disembodied data of lived experience. For example, Lesley Jo Weaver’s Sugar and Tension (2018) is an ethnographic study of women in North India around the stresses of managing diabetes. Along with Emily Mendenhall’s recent book Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty and HIV, they provide a road map for richly ethnographic critical biocultural studies. Mendenhall effectively connects the lived experience of structural violence and poverty to the syndemic interactions of diabetes and other health problems (e.g., HIV/AIDS and depression) across a number of global contexts (from Delhi, Nairobi, and Soweto to Chicago); and does so in large part by analytically connecting the hard edges of social worlds to the very personal experience of these worlds.