Clarence C. Gravlee

Medical anthropology is the study of health and healing in cross-cultural and evolutionary perspective. This expansive definition matches the scope of the field: It is at once a humanistic and scientific enterprise that crosses both disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries and values both applied and basic research. Medical anthropology’s holistic and integrative approach to human experience enriches our understanding of sickness and health, but it also poses a challenge in attempting to delineate the range of research methods relevant to the field: Medical anthropologists draw on the whole toolkit of social science, and many researchers also integrate methods from the humanities, public health, biomedicine, and the life sciences.

In the wake of COVID-19, the challenge is even greater because disruptions to anthropological research – as to daily life – forced both methodological experimentation and epistemological reflection. Even before the pandemic, many researchers had turned to digital methods and the study of virtual worlds (Snodgrass 2015). Anthropologists had also contested the notion of “the field” as a bounded, unitary, or even physical place (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Marcus 1995) and argued for participatory and decolonizing modes of research (Harrison 2010). COVID-19 intensified all these trends. We do not yet know what the long-term effects of this moment will be for anthropological research, but I imagine we will look back on it as a rupture.