Journal article
Ethnography and quantification: Insights from epidemiology for Indigenous health equity
American anthropologist, Vol.125(1), pp.36-48
03/2023
DOI: 10.1111/aman.13797
Abstract
A growing body of critical ethnography compellingly demonstrates how "evidence-based" trends are further privileging narrowly construed quantitative statistics, indicators, and metrics in ways that build on widespread cultural assumptions about the alleged objectivity of numerical data. In working to challenge these uncritical and positivist illusions, these studies provide more contextualized understandings and often also advocate for more pluralistic approaches that make use of multiple ways of knowing. Drawing examples from a transnational ethnographic project with epidemiologists who work to promote Indigenous health equity, I call attention here to how postpositivist approaches are already active in quantitative professions, galvanized in part by growing intersections between evidence-based trends and rights/justice advocacy. Closer attention to such pro-equity quantitative work highlights the need to expand the ethnographic questions that anthropologists ask about the relationships between quantification, positivism, and privilege. Such expansion stands to benefit anthropological understandings of knowledge politics in the "evidence-based" era and contributes to ongoing conversations about how to de-center and decolonize ethnographic inquiry.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Ethnography and quantification: Insights from epidemiology for Indigenous health equity
- Creators
- Erica Prussing - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- American anthropologist, Vol.125(1), pp.36-48
- Publisher
- Wiley
- DOI
- 10.1111/aman.13797
- ISSN
- 0002-7294
- eISSN
- 1548-1433
- Number of pages
- 13
- Grant note
- 8488 / Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research 1259051 / National Science Foundation; National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 11/11/2022
- Date published
- 03/2023
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology; Community and Behavioral Health
- Record Identifier
- 9984319257702771
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