Reversing the hierarchy: rethinking multidisciplinarity in drug research

Abstract

A lesson of ethnography is that the devil is in the details. Ethnographic data, as a result, often are mobilised to call broad generalisations and sweeping categorisations into question. In the arena of drug research, the ability of ethnography to turn a highpowered lens on a single case (e.g. a population of drug users in a local setting)*/illuminating thereby particular characteristics and patterns in full detail (and hence, through the accumulation of cases, the actual diversity that comprises seemingly uniform behaviour)*/has been used time and again to show the real shortcomings of epidemiological concepts and categories. Thus, often used terms like ‘sex partner of an injection drug user’, ‘intravenous drug user’, and ‘syringe sharing’ have been held up to critical review as accurate, adequate, or meaningful concepts for public health research. Underlying the tendency of ethnographers to deconstruct what, at first blush, seems to be useful epidemiological efforts to characterise social and behavioural realities is an exceptionalist tendency that*/prior to the development of a more reflexive, less authoritative tone in anthropological discourse*/was referred to sometimes as the ‘not my people’ response. Anthropologists who, traditionally, identified with the people they studied to such an extent that they easily slipped into using possessive language, often argued that any broad brush statement made about human behaviour was contradicted by their on-the-ground, ethnographic experiences with particular people, in a specific place, during a bounded period of time. In response to statements from various quarters that humans are inherently aggressive, for example, would come the anthropological retort: ‘not my people, the X are peaceful’. Or to suggestions that males are competitive by nature, some ethnographers could be expected to counter: ‘among my people, the Y, men seek to avoid competition’. And so on. At its worst, the tendency of anthropology to point out exceptions to any generalisation has contributed to a woeful disinclination to build or embrace theory (or to even, in the worst instances, see the value of theory); however, at its best, this trait has allowed ethnography to pinpoint the holes in perspectives and models that have lost sight of complexity in the human repertoire. I invoke the ‘not my people’ response here because I find that some of the articles in the recent special issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy on ethnography and multidisciplinarity slipped into the trap of using a limited number of cases to produce overly broad generalisations about a complex social reality. Generalisations that do not fit ‘my people’ as clarified below. Bourgois (2002), in a paper that is at once wonderfully provocative and troublesomely problematic, begins the slippage by asserting that ‘it is surprising that most anthropologists know nothing about the quantitative methods that they are often hostile towards’. Anthropologists who work on drug research? Not ‘my’ anthropologists (that is, those I know, collaborate with, read)! In fact, for over a decade (but stretching back to the early work of the still nimble greybeard, Agar) most anthropologists in drug research, at least those who toil in the nervous streets and vial-strewn crack houses that occupy points along the long expanse of real estate between Bourgois’ two best known drug research field sites (New York City and San Francisco), as well as those with peculiar accents found across the pond, have worked quite closely with epidemiologists. They may not like everything they have come to know about epidemiology during this time, but, like Bourgois, they certainly know a lot more than nothing about it. Multidisciplinary research teams, ethno-epidemiology, multimethod designs, and the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data, in fact, have become E-mail address: anthro8566@aol.com (M. Singer). International Journal of Drug Policy 14 (2003) 111 /114