Challenging perceptions of disciplinary divide: an ethnographer’s experience of collegiality, collaboration and crisis

Abstract

Warned by social scientists about ‘the disciplinary divide’ and the hostility of medical professionals to qualitative research, I was pleasantly surprised by the collegiality I experienced while conducting fieldwork among clinician-researchers in South Africa. This commentary is a challenge to common discourse, historically dominant in a global (north) anthropology, that biomedical practitioners are necessarily antagonistic to the humanities. Drawing on my field experiences, I propose an optimistic outlook for collaboration and inclusivity in developing medical and health humanities in Africa. While conducting anthropological fieldwork among doctors producing medical research, I gained access to elite professional spaces, even presenting anthropological work in medical research forums. I established relationships with leading figures in various clinical departments and research institutes. There were, unsurprisingly, times when I had to rigorously defend my methodology. I had to revise my methodological knowledge including on quantitative methods to explain varying epistemologies to both sympathetic and doubtful medical colleagues. But, I was often treated as a fellow researcher, a colleague. Some clinician-researchers accepted me as having different, valuable expertise to analyse human complexity and proposed opportunities for possible collaboration. I argue that these clinicians appreciated this expertise because of their pervasive perceptions of crisis in healthcare and an awareness of the complexities of biomedicine in an African context of social heterogeneity, medical pluralism and legacies of social injustice. These concerns around crisis and complexity may be points of leverage for expanding interdisciplinary collaboration and facilitating access to research sites and research forums.

Biomedicine and the humanities: growing pains

“…In just the same way that historians, artists or anthropologists will likely be unaware of the latest technical shifts in HIV research or kidney care, a nurse cannot be expected to know about the critical turn, or to realise that as a discipline history may have left behind the text-based model that we were taught at school and moved into the ‘real world’. We might know the headlines, but—unless we work in a way such as that van der Wiel describes in this volume,6 specifically to understand the architecture of clinical practice and researchx—we will not understand the structure that produces these headlines.…”

Partnerships and Collaborations: The Right Alliances for Clinical Trials in Africa

“…Recognition and integration of work culture are important for successful collaboration across sites, especially in Africa, where diverse ethnicities make regional as well as international collaborations intriguing. 14 To this effect, international clinical electives have been shown to be effective in preparing young potential investigators to receive cross-cultural educational and gain research skills to equip them for future collaborative work. 15 …”