Building a Community of Anthropological Practice: The Case of Anthropologists Working within the United States’ Largest Health Care System

Abstract

The disciplinary contribution of anthropologists employed outside traditional anthropology departments has been a topic of discussion and debate in the field for nearly a century. Alongside industry, nongovernmental, and nonprofit career paths, an increasing number of anthropologists have developed productive research careers outside of academic anthropology departments. The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which provides health care services to more than 9 million United States military veterans annually, is one federal employer that has become a professional home to many anthropologists. Anthropologists working in VA represent all four fields, have established roots in health services research, and have grown a national network of ethnographically-informed colleagues. These anthropologists constitute a Community of Practice that collaborates and contributes to scholarly discourse, health care operations, and policy. In this article, eight anthropologists with over 120 years of collective experience share insights into how our community of anthropological practice came into being, the organizational culture that sustains it, and the potential opportunities in health research for emerging scholars. Working at the intersection of multiple disciplines, this geographically dispersed community offers a viable model for anthropologists embedded within health care systems, in clinical academic settings, and learners seeking to broaden their understanding of anthropological praxis beyond anthropology departments.

Implicit and explicit: a scoping review exploring the contribution of anthropological practice in implementation science

“…The visualization shows co-authorship links between authors of the included publications; a link for each author represents the number of co-authors that person has in the dataset and the total link strength would be the number of co-authored publications that the author has in the dataset. Of the 15 authors who have the most links and strongest total links, only three are trained as anthropologists and two of those work for the US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), which is known for its large number of medical anthropologist researchers [ 25 ]. The training disciplines of the others include public health, sociology, psychology, medicine, nursing, and computer and information science.…”

“…Another way to answer these questions could be a qualitative study of anthropologists in implementation research. For example, anthropologists working in the Veterans Health Administration represent a big portion of practitioners in this space [ 25 ], yet it was difficult to “see” them in the way we analyzed affiliations or funding sources.…”

“…Future research could consider similar questions about anthropology in implementation science looking at the training and employment of the researchers directly rather than implying it from the descriptions of their work within the literature. Fix and colleagues have done similar work focused on the VA specifically [ 25 , 30 ]. Nonetheless, our findings offer an important look into the role of anthropological methods in the implementation science literature as a way for practitioners to interrogate their own roles within the field and reflect on how they contribute to the canonization of ways of doing and publishing implementation research.…”