Keywords
One Health
Ethnography
Multi-disciplinary
Posthumanism
Cultural construction
How to Cite
Abstract
A recent trend in public health campaigns has been to include non-human health data to capture all relevant variables related to human well-being. This specific approach is the foundation of the World Health Organization restructuring in the early 2000s as they adopted the “one health” framework. Politically, this movement is influential and draws significant health funding globally. "One health" is characterized by a multi-disciplinary collaboration between medical, veterinary, and health sciences. Similarly, the post-human turn in medical anthropology recognizes that viewing the non-human contributions to the cultural construction of health as symbolic does not adequately address how non-humans and nature independently contribute to human health realities. Ethnographic studies of the non-human perspective shed light on how humans are not the only beings that influence culturally constructed reality, nor are they exclusively in control of cultural phenomena. Theoretical trends in anthropology and public health seemingly converge; however, an artificial academic barrier between the sciences and social sciences remains. As these two disciplines are coming closer together through their data, breaking down structural barriers that prevent the successful integration of knowledge has potential to improve human health outcomes. Methodological concessions will have to occur on all sides to make the inclusion of the social sciences in public health possible. Doing so can bring academia closer to a comprehensive scientific understanding of human health.
References
Adams, Vincanne, Nancy J. Burke, and Ian Whitmarsh. 2014. “Slow Research: Thoughts for a Movement in Global Health.” Medical Anthropology 33(3): 179-197. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2013.858335.
APHA (American Public Health Association). 2023. “What is Public Health”. Accessed September 22, 2023. https://www.apha.org/what-is-public-health.
Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40(Supplement): 311-27. https://doi.org/10.1086/200061.
Brown, Hannah, Alex M. Nading. 2019. “Introduction: Human Animal Health in Medical Anthropology.” Medicine Anthropology Quarterly 33(1): 5-23. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12488.
Gray, Arabella. 2023. “Animal Origin of Covid-19 Found?.” Veterinary Record 192(9): 352-353. https://doi.org/10.1002/vetr.3008.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. 412-453. New York: Basic Books.
Granado, Stefanie, Lenore Manderson, Brigit Obrist, and Marcel Tanner. 2011. “Appropriating Malaria: Responses to Malaria Treatment and Prevention in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.” Medical Anthropology 30(1): 102-121. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2010.488664.
Harrison, Anthony Kwame. 2018. “Introduction to Ethnography.” In Ethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research: 1-39. New York: Oxford University Press.
Keck, Frédéric and Christos Lynteris. 2018. “Zoonosis: Prospects and Challenges for Medical Anthropology.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 5(3): 1-14. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.5.3.372.
Lainé, Nicolas. 2018. “Elephant Tuberculosis as a Reverse Zoonosis: Post-Colonial Scenes of Compassion, Conservation, and Public Health in Laos and France.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 5(3): 157-176. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.5.3.379.
Lee, Charlotte T., Rahim Kanji, Angel H. Wang, Aaida Mamuji, Jack Rozdilsky, and Terri Chiu. 2021. “Cultural Contexts During a Pandemic: A Qualitative Description of Cultural Factors that Shape Protective Behaviours in the Chinese-Canadian Community.” BMC Public Health 21(1897): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-11928-w.
Lévesque, Francis. 2018. “Sixty Years of Dog Management in Inuvik.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 5(3):195-212. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.5.3.554.
Lock, Margaret, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 1996. “A Critical-Interpretive Approach in Medical Anthropology: Rituals and Routines of Discipline and Dissent.” In Medical Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Method: 41-70. London: Praeger.
Lock, Margaret, and Vinh-Kim Nguyen. 2018. “Colonial Disease and Biological Commensurability.” In An Anthropology of Biomedicine. 2nd Ed. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Ombere, Stephen Okumu. 2022. “Negotiating Access to Maternal Health Services During COVID-19 Pandemic in Kilifi County, Kenya: Rapid Qualitative Study.” In Understanding Post-COVID-19 Social and Cultural Realities: Global Context: 123-136, edited by Sajal Roy and Debasish Nandy. Springer: Singapore.
Porter, Natalie. 2013. “Global Health Cadres: Avian Fly Control and Practical Statecraft in Vietnam.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 28(1): 64-100. https://doi.org/10.1355/sj28-1c.
Power, Kevin, Zita McCrea, Maire White, Annette Breen, Brendan Dunleavy, Sean O’Donoghue, Tim Jacquemard, Veronica Lambert, Hany El-Naggar, Norman Delanty, Colin Doherty, and Mary Fitzsimons. 2020. “The Development of an Epilepsy Electronic Patient Portal: Facilitating both Patient Empowerment and Remote Clinician-patient Interaction in a Post-COVID-19 World.” Epilepsia (Copenhagen) 61(9): 1894-1905. https://doi.org/10.1111/epi.16627.
Rock, Melanie. 2017. “Multi-Species Entanglements, Anthropology, and Environmental Health Justice.” In Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, edited by Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, 356-369. New York: Routledge.
Rock, Melanie, Bonnie J. Buntain, Jennifer M. Hatfield, and Benedikt Hallgrimsson. 2009. “Animal-Human Connections, ‘One Health’, and the Syndemic Approach to Prevention.” Social Science & Medicine 68: 991-995. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2008.12.047.
Sablehoff, Annabelle. 2001. Reordering the Natural World: Humans and Animals in the City. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Signer, Merrill. 2014. “Zoonotic Ecosyndemics and Multispecies Ethnography.” Anthropology Quarterly 87(4): 1279-1309. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2014.0060.
Smart, Alan, and Josephine Smart. 2017. Posthumanism. Anthropological Insights. North York: University of Toronto Press.
Steffens, Travis S., and Elizabeth Finnis. 2022. “Context Matters: Leveraging Anthropology Within One Health.” One Health 14: 100393-100393. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.onehlt.2022.100393.
Strang, Veronica. 2017. “Justice for All: Inconvenient Truths and Reconciliation in Human-Non-Human Relations." In Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, edited by Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, 259-275. New York: Routledge.
Sullivan, Sian. 2017. “What’s Ontology Got to Do with It?.” In Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, edited by Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, 155-169. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Louise H., Sophia M. Latham, and Mark E. J. Woolhouse. 2001. “Risk Factors for Human Disease Emergence.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences 356(1411): 983-989. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2001.0888.
van Helden, Paul D., Leslie S. van Helden, and Eileen G. Hoal. 2013. “One World, One Health.” EMBO Reports. 14(6): 497-501.
Vindrola-Padros, Celia, and Vindrola-Padros, Bruno. 2018. “Quick and Dirty? A Systematic Review of the Use of Rapid Ethnographies in Healthcare Delivery.” BMJ Quality and Safety 27(4): 321-330. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2017-007226.
Waldram, James B. 2006. “The View from the Hogan: Cultural Epidemiology and the Return to Ethnography.” Transcultural Psychiatry 43(1): 72-85. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461506061758.
WHO (World Health Organization). 2017. “One Health.” Accessed April 6, 2023. https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/one-health.
Wolf, Meike. 2015. “Is There Really Such a Thing as ‘One Health’? Thinking About a More Than Human World from the Perspective of Cultural Anthropology.” Social Science & Medicine 129: 5-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.06.018s.
Zerner, Charles. 2005. “Emerging Cartographies of Environmental Danger: Africa, Ebola, and AIDS.” In Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties, Edited by Betsy Hartmann, Banu Subramanian, and Charles Zerner. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2023 Katie LaBrie