Soc Sci Med. 1990 ; 30(2): 189-97.

Three propositions for a critically applied medical anthropology.

Scheper-Hughes N.

Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley 94720.

This paper initiates a discussion of some viable approaches to a critically applied as opposed to a clinically applied medical anthropology. The old question of the role of the intellectual man or woman is at the heart of this enquiry. Analogies are drawn between the current relations of anthropology to medicine and the history of anthropology's relations to European colonialism. The dilemmas of the clinically applied anthropologists 'double agent' role is discussed and alternatives offered in the form of three separate and to some extent contradictory projects, each of which, however, demands that the anthropologists cut loose his or her moorings from conventional biomedical premises and epistemologies. Ours must be an anthropology of affliction and not simply an anthropology of medicine. Praxis must not be left in the hands of those who would only represent the best interests of biomedical hegemony.