Collaborative ethnography and a call for pluralism and dialogic knowledge in health equity debates and global cancer research culture

Abstract

Scholars in medical anthropology note that, despite more than 25 years of anthropological studies on cancer, much of this scholarship remains marginal in mainstream public health approaches. This paper examines social practices, biases, and unnoticed assumptions in mainstream global health research culture that prevents anthropology from having a more influential role in cancer research and policy agendas. It focuses on the day-to-day, ordinary, micro academic practices in which differential power distribution exacerbates inequity within the field, ignoring the role played by approaches with disciplinarian, epistemological and geopolitical peripheries. Inspired by a Bourdieusian epistemic reflexivity, this autoethnography systematized and analyzed through decolonial lenses some deterrents within real-world-research practices, including as the corpus own studies on cancer and inequalities studies that were based on collaborative ethnography (2013–2024). Six categories account for such deterrents in the global field: 1) Public health mainstream-centrism and the lack of recognition of anthropological knowledge principles; 2) Restrictive conception of ethics; 3) Similis Simili Gaudet biases – to be inclined to select what is alike; 4) Ethnocentric and naïve assumptions in relation to the road from evidence to practice; 5) Unconsidered dimensions of collaborations: Strengthening citizenship; 6) The moral economy of (only) professional trajectories interests and hidden priorities. It concludes by noting that anthropology has a lot to provide in the search for a genuinely democratic, plural, and decentralized knowledge in global cancer equity debates strengthening paradigms of dialogue, still so fragile and invisible in the field of cancer and public health in general.