Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the Body
(The research group that comprises the UCB side of
Joint UCB/UCSF Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology)

The core faculty on the Berkeley side of the Joint Program together form an organized research group called Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body. This group links medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and postcolonial and psychoanalytic anthropology. There are four faculty in the group: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Program Director of Medical Anthropology; Paul Rabinow, Director of the Project on Genomics and Society; Lawrence Cohen, Co-director of Medical Anthropology, and Stefania Pandolfo. Together with colleagues at Berkeley and UCSF and with graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the Joint UCB-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program and in the Department of Anthropology, these scholars have created both the most diverse and the most contemporary program in the field.

The expansion of traditional medical anthropology at Berkeley into Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body reflects several disciplinary breakthroughs associated with our faculty. Though variants of "medical anthropology" are almost as old as the parent discipline of anthropology, the organized field emerged in post-war North America as an effort to link international public health, ethnomedicine, and allied social science in the service of the anthropology of development. The field shared both the promise and the limits of modernization theory more generally. Both the critical Marxist and symbolic/interpretive challenges of the 1970s and 1980s thickened debate, along with closer links to historical analyses of the scholarly medical traditions and to the development of qualitative methodologies concurrent with the expansion of NIH, NIMH, and other governmental programs of research support.

Despite the rapid growth of the field at this time, most research remained auxiliary to the categorical if not the political and economic imperatives of biomedicine. With the arrival of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Berkeley became a leader in defining what she famously termed a "critically applied medical anthropology." Critically applied medical anthropology refused the theory/applied divide that characterized so many departments and programs, arguing the impossibility of separating "theoretical" debate in cultural anthropology and the human sciences on the one hand and more "applied" commitment to the health and survival of communities and groups, on the other. Scheper-Hughes's articulation of a critical anthropology of hunger offers a powerful example of the change in the field she was instrumental in creating.

The rise of this movement at Berkeley led to a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s with two dominant programs in graduate training, critical medical anthropology in the Joint Program at Berkeley and UCSF and interpretive medical anthropology at Harvard. Lawrence Cohen came from Harvard in 1992 to join Scheper-Hughes, and the teaching and joint research that has resulted from their collaboration represent a critical and ongoing conversation bringing together the leading formations in the field. Cohen has worked to link debates between critical, interpretive, and biocultural medical anthropologies to broader theoretical questions of materialization that have emerged in feminist and queer scholarship.

The rapid growth of science studies and the increasing centrality of both science and the body to contemporary debate in the academy posed new challenges to medical anthropology. Paul Rabinow has studied the new genomics intensively, work leading to three books and to the development of what he has termed an anthropology of reason. Against too-easy criticism of scientific and medical practice that did not question what Michel Foucault called the "speaker's benefit" of the critic, Rabinow offered a method and a form of analysis that offered a way out of the endless battles of the "Culture Wars." Berkeley anthropology emerged as the most powerful alternative to the dominant approaches to the sociology of science and science studies.

From the mid-1990s and on, these two streams of medical anthropology and the anthropology of reason have been in closer and sharper interaction. Scheper-Hughes wrote a famous article calling for a "Barefoot Anthropology"; Rabinow offered his own vision of a "Well-Heeled Anthropology," and Medical Anthropology Program affliliates Professors Laura Nader and Aihwa Ong both authored important responses to this debate. Far from pushing students towards either pole, the debate constituted a space for encouraging students to link critical, interpretive, and genealogic analysis.

In a world of linking new genomics, bioinformatics, and pharmacotherapy to corporate medicine and public-private hybrid structures internationally, "bioethics" has become ever more ubiquitous and empty a critical practice. The question of ethics and more generally of human futures links the current work of Cohen, Rabinow, and Scheper-Hughes. To this question and to the related investigation of trauma, loss, and healing, Stefania Pandolfo brings a rigorous anthropological conversation incorporating contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis and her research in a Moroccan psychiatric hospital.

Pandolfo's work provides a bridge allowing for analysis linking medical anthropology and recent social theories of language, melancholy and the body. Pandolfo has offered extensive training to graduate students in the anthropology of medicine, science, and psychiatry, linking a reexamination of existential psychiatry and a close engagement with the work of scholars from Benjamin and Blanchot to Freud, Lacan, and Binswanger to both Mahgrebi and European clinical and theoretical work.

Other Berkeley anthropology faculty affiliated with the Medical Anthropology Program bring important resources to graduate student training in the critical analysis of medicine, science, and psychiatry. Laura Nader was instrumental in helping to define the field and remains a leading scholar of medicine and the state. Stanley Brandes has studied many topics of relevance to the field, including alcohol and culture and questions of death and the body. Mariane Ferme examines bodily practice in relation to intersections of gender, knowledge, and power. Donald Moore links the critical spatial analysis of political ecology to race, nature, and the politics of difference. His ethnographic work engages micropractices of biopower in the context of colonial and postcolonial governmentality.