In the spirit of collegiality and a slightly over keen fashion, I proposed a collaborative playlist to this year’s Medical Anthropology module group. Inspired by a lecturer’s sprightly, course-themed tunes once upon a time, it seemed like a distraction that just about passed as work-related. 

The loose criteria for entry were a song or album title pertaining to the themes of medical anthropology. I soon discovered I had very little idea what this actually meant. Beyond titular nods to ethnography and understanding illness and suffering, the contours of the discipline remained exceedingly elusive. Repeatedly, I sought to assign theories to singular, pre-defined fields of enquiry in the hope of resolving this. 

Eventually I gleaned both the point —of troubling taken-for-granted categories— and the irony of my attempts at strict classification. Classification has long been an object of anthropological attention. So, too, have boundaries. To take boundaries as immutable and static in a shifting global landscape of health enquiry is to remain blind to broader, intersectional effects playing out in unpredictable ways. Medical anthropology disentangles diagnoses and treatment from the commercial and political architecture they inevitably sit within. But it also elucidates how scientific practices and ways of researching health continue to organise society and societal ways of understanding. It illustrates how broader forms of belonging and difference, rights to care and support, and orderings of knowledge can —and do— operate through the language of biomedicine. And it offers much for critically repositioning the research gaze in global and public health. 

This playlist presents a few eclectic additions, from a small number of students. It is by no means representative of the cohort or its much more extensive tastes. It hints at just some of the themes that medical anthropology is able to decipher from its rich, discerning vantage point.