Practices of disciplinary symbiosis: (Re)blending theory and method, anthropology and public health.

Abstract

If you are dually trained in anthropology and public health and your goal is an academic career, in what academic unit should you make your professional home? Should you be a public health-trained academic anthropologist or an anthropologist in a public health school or program? Associate Professor of Public Health Anne Sebert Kuhlmann and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Stephanie McClure see their dual training as essential to enacting the career goal of fostering understanding of and positively affecting health in people's everyday lives and preparing students to do the same. "We credit our dual training for our robust perspectives on the nature and causes of health and illness and our recognition that theory and methods are complementary tools in teaching and research. We also recognize that though dual training brings conceptual power and functional applicability to our work, it can also be a challenge to navigate a career path that effectively blends the two. Conventional hierarchies in academia and in public health practice can position the two disciplines for conflict rather than complementarity". In this article, the two first review the complementarity and conflict between anthropology and public health. Next, shifting to a conversational mode, they compare their paths to dual training, their attempts and successes at bringing those blended perspectives to bear in their current positions, and their ideas about more robustly inhabiting (within themselves) and fostering (between the disciplines) public health/anthropology collaborations.