Academics Pen Manifesto: "The End of Medical Anthropology in Canada?"

In February, a number of Canadian medican anthropologists signed off on a manifesto decrying the decline in funding for their discipline, which could dramatically undermine, as they rightly describe it, "one of the most vibrant, high-demand and policy-relevant health disciplines."

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has traditionally provided funding for medical anthropological research and training, but there is a perception that, for a health-oriented discipline, the funding mandate of SSHRC overlaps with that of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), which does invite applications from anthropologists whose work deals with "social, cultural, environmental and population health." However, CIHR has a demonstrably thin commitment to funding the sort of ethnographically-rich, socioculturally-centered work that anthropologists offer; instead, they tend to fund projects with more proximate and concrete consequences for the health of Canadians or domestic policy concerns (undermining the possibility of international fieldwork or collaboration, or comparative work). Their funding mandate and selection process simply isn't designed to accommodate anthropological work, while SSHRC's is - in the words of the manifesto writers, SSHRC has always understood that "health is inherently social and cultural."

For my own funding applications, I was very anxious - about whether SSHRC would reject my work as being under CIHR's mandate, and forward my application to CIHR, who would then reject it as being too socially-oriented. And this is the problem: medical anthropology's strength is that it straddles the humanities and the sciences. This prevents it from being wholly either, which is administratively awkward. But given the choice between funding from the one agency, which has a history of supporting long-term, theoretically broad, ethnographically rich and international projects, and funding from the other, which favors short-term, narrowly hypothesis-driven and domestic projects, it's clear which is best for our work and, by extension, the furthered understanding of social, cultural and individual health.

At any rate, the manifesto is here - The End of Medical Anthropology in Canada? - and I recommend reading it. It's a bit sad and a bit scary, particularly in that this shift in funding priorities reflects broader trends we're all familiar with. But it's a good read, and with a few big names signed off on it (incl. Margaret Lock and Sandra Hyde from my own alma mater), it's a very good start.