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The cultural construction of biomedicine and public health itself came under increasing scrutiny, making manifest the important distinction between anthropology in medicine, which many early applied efforts represented, and anthropology of medicine (Foster 1974 [after Straus 1957], p. 2). Investigations into the medicalization of pregnancy and birth were central to increased appreciation of this distinction (see Browner and Sargent 2007).

Anthropology of medicine was buoyed by increased distrust of the “grand narratives” of modernity a la Lyotard (1979) as well as (in the USA particularly) the post-Vietnam War drive to “question authority” and academic anthropology’s related swing to the “intellectual Left” (D’Andrade 2000, p. 219). The situation was somewhat similar in Europe, as “anti-hegemonic social movements” were thriving (Hsu 2012, p. 51). Employment within the ivory tower supported medical anthropology’s close questioning of biomedicine’s and public health’s established agendas by providing a safe space for – and indeed, a cultural climate encouraging of – contemplations that would not have been safely brought into a practitioner workplace. Protected from the need to bring in contracts and grants, invigorated by increasingly popular “anti-establishment” sentiment, many university-employed US anthropologists proclaimed participation in government- or corporate-sponsored foreign- or domestic-aid work as retrogressive – as standing in the way of real social progress.