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Reinventing Wheels?
The named subdiscipline of medical anthropology has existed now for over 60 years. Its degree programs and textbooks have proliferated. However, and perhaps partly as a result, much present scholarship is in some ways redundant. For one thing, concepts and new bits of jargon delineated in popular publications are applied or repeated ad nauseam as others seeking to advance follow fashion. Take, for instance, “biological citizenship,” key to Adriana Petryna’s theorization of Chernobyl-injured Ukranians’ struggles with the state over access to health care and related resources (2002). Petryna’s work was part of a wave of innovative writing on biosociality (Rabinow’s term) that also spawned various other forms of corporeally anchored “citizenships.” By the end of the decade, however, the biocitizenship construct had, some said, lost its analytic power (Cooter 2008; and see Whyte 2009).
A second source of redundant scholarship in medical anthropology today is its magnitude. The literature is vastly more extensive now than a generation ago, making total command a real challenge. Concurrently, journal submission length limits have shrunk as publishers have had to economize (and to accommodate readers’ new habits), limiting the thoroughness of literature reviews. Sometimes areas of study, despite certain scholars’ insistence that they are brand new, have actually been scrutinized by many scholars previously.