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Various answers to the cri de coeur notwithstanding, Christie Kiefer’s contribution to the definitional debate (1975) bemoaned the “irritating question” to begin with (p. 1). Kiefer worried that in trying to delimit the subfield we may cause it to wither on the vine. The quality that makes the field helpful and interesting, he said, is its very disorderliness. This only makes us “seasick” he says because “medicine thrives on orthodoxy” (p. 1); the quest to define medical anthropology reflects, he suggested, an infection with medicine’s quest for “exactitude” (p. 2). Contrasting “certainty on the one hand and meaningfulness on the other,” Kiefer argued that we should “stoutly insist” on keeping medical anthropology undefined and indeterminate.

While SMA and some of the cognate associations that emerged globally have offered various concrete definitions of the subfield’s focal concerns, and medical anthropology does have a sociocultural emphasis overall, it has matured into an inclusive arena for scholarship concerning health as a biocultural phenomenon. Furthermore, as Hsu and Potter argue, the field is “polymorph”: there are no “distinctive national styles of doing medical anthropology; diversity prevails even within a single language community [and] trans-Atlantic exchanges have always drawn on a serious engagement with research in Asia, Africa, Meso- and South America” (2012, p. 1). Likewise, Metzner and Warren position medical anthropology as a “global discipline” (2018, p. 551).