I have been pondering over this post for a couple of weeks now. I
find the questions posed particularly provocative for me since my work
takes place in a domain ostensibly devoted to “public health”. What
would it mean to think about “the good” within epidemiologic practices
beyond the metric of “health”? (By epidemiologic practices, I mean
much more than the discipline of epidemiology. I am trying to develop
a concept of a coherent field that is not a scientific discipline, but
a relation between knowledge production and interventions
into/alterations of norms of life around the problem of epidemics,
including both ‘scientists’ and others). In conversations with
scientists working in the field, I am constantly asked to justify my
own anthropological work in terms of a contribution to health.

For me, a necessary place to start is with health itself, a concept
the meaning, value and norms of which are not self evident.
Canguilhem’s writing on health, normality, and pathology distinguish
‘health’ from the ‘normalized population’. He refuses to grant
validity to the population-based statistical norm as a means for
determining whether or not an individual has disease. Yet “this does
not mean that for a given individual the distinction is not absolute.
When an individual begins to feel sick, to call himself sick, to
comport himself as a sick man, he has passed into a different universe
and become a different man” (130). Illness, in this sense, is a
“subjective universal”: though what counts as health and what counts
as disease are variable and difficult to determine, within every
individual there is a definite and absolute temporal distinction
between health and disease. This distinction is not a purely
biological one, but rather a difference between two different
universes, two different men, two ways of comportment and
self-recognition.

In China, the word for public health is gonggongweisheng. Ruth
Rogaski, a historian, has written a very good book about the rise of
modern public health in China. She argues that this rise turns on a
pivotal change in the concept attached to the term weisheng. The
characters of weisheng (卫生), taken independently and literally, mean
‘guard life’. Rogaski writes that before the modern period, weisheng
referred to a set of longstanding Taoist practices of preserving or
enhancing life. These practices included certain kinds of exercises,
foods to be eaten and foods proscribed, ways of breathing, etc.

In the nineteenth century, Japan sent emissaries to Europe to study
modern state government. These emissaries returned to Japan
particularly impressed by German state hygiene methods. They used the
Chinese characters 卫生 (in Japanese, eisei) to name the state health
system modeled on German hygiene. According to Rogaski, the concept,
as well as the methods and practices, were brought to China during the
Japanese occupation of port cities. Rogaski argues that modern
Chinese weisheng involves norms of hygiene and mass interventions
(public toilets, sewers, vaccinations, removal of disease-carrying
vectors or dangerous environments) with the objective of improving the
health of the people.

Perhaps weisheng, in the Taoist sense of ‘guarding life’, might enable
a similar move as Foucault’s turn to the “culture of the self” notion
of soteria, ‘salvation, protecting life’. The difference between
these two concepts of weisheng can be a useful orienting device for
examining epidemiologic practices beyond the modern metric of
population health. As with Canguilhem, it does not ignore health
completely, but proposes a different way of looking at the nature of
life, health, disease and death.

What you write contains embedded good questions, for which there
are some incomplete answers. Overall, it’s fair to think of this as
a kind of “average commission” in a case where few or none
of its members understand the substance of the subject
manner. Imagine an analogous commission in a Hiroshima-
free, WWII free, world, with some slightly off-key
remit like the “Pitchblende commission”,
or the “Radio-activity commission”, with no people who
really understood the physics, but with smart people who
understood the Kellog-Bryand pact, and with some engineers
who had pioneered the development of the 16 inch gun
for battleships for technical briefings, and you are closer.
It’s not clear to me how one does better in a technically
sophisticated space where things really are moving fast,
either. More offline. 27 September 2010

http://www.marshall.edu/coll-anth/

Collaborative Anthropologies is a forum for dialogue with a special focus on the complex collaborations between and among researchers and research participants/interlocutors. It features essays that are descriptive as well as analytical, from all subfields of anthropology and closely related disciplines, and that present a diversity of perspectives on collaborative research.

http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Collaborative-Anthropologies,673970.aspx

I think that whilst it is true that scientists have to respond to these other rationalities and arbitrate, anxiously or otherwise, between them, an additional point is that they don’t necessarily know what has scientific significance outside of these self-stylizations, or outside a metric of utiltiy. Perhaps this is where the angst comes from?

I have been pondering over this post for a couple of weeks now. I
find the questions posed particularly provocative for me since my work
takes place in a domain ostensibly devoted to “public health”. What
would it mean to think about “the good” within epidemiologic practices
beyond the metric of “health”? (By epidemiologic practices, I mean
much more than the discipline of epidemiology. I am trying to develop
a concept of a coherent field that is not a scientific discipline, but
a relation between knowledge production and interventions
into/alterations of norms of life around the problem of epidemics,
including both ‘scientists’ and others). In conversations with
scientists working in the field, I am constantly asked to justify my
own anthropological work in terms of a contribution to health.

For me, a necessary place to start is with health itself, a concept
the meaning, value and norms of which are not self evident.
Canguilhem’s writing on health, normality, and pathology distinguish
‘health’ from the ‘normalized population’. He refuses to grant
validity to the population-based statistical norm as a means for
determining whether or not an individual has disease. Yet “this does
not mean that for a given individual the distinction is not absolute.
When an individual begins to feel sick, to call himself sick, to
comport himself as a sick man, he has passed into a different universe
and become a different man” (130). Illness, in this sense, is a
“subjective universal”: though what counts as health and what counts
as disease are variable and difficult to determine, within every
individual there is a definite and absolute temporal distinction
between health and disease. This distinction is not a purely
biological one, but rather a difference between two different
universes, two different men, two ways of comportment and
self-recognition.

In China, the word for public health is gonggongweisheng. Ruth
Rogaski, a historian, has written a very good book about the rise of
modern public health in China. She argues that this rise turns on a
pivotal change in the concept attached to the term weisheng. The
characters of weisheng (卫生), taken independently and literally, mean
‘guard life’. Rogaski writes that before the modern period, weisheng
referred to a set of longstanding Taoist practices of preserving or
enhancing life. These practices included certain kinds of exercises,
foods to be eaten and foods proscribed, ways of breathing, etc.

In the nineteenth century, Japan sent emissaries to Europe to study
modern state government. These emissaries returned to Japan
particularly impressed by German state hygiene methods. They used the
Chinese characters 卫生 (in Japanese, eisei) to name the state health
system modeled on German hygiene. According to Rogaski, the concept,
as well as the methods and practices, were brought to China during the
Japanese occupation of port cities. Rogaski argues that modern
Chinese weisheng involves norms of hygiene and mass interventions
(public toilets, sewers, vaccinations, removal of disease-carrying
vectors or dangerous environments) with the objective of improving the
health of the people.

Perhaps weisheng, in the Taoist sense of ‘guarding life’, might enable
a similar move as Foucault’s turn to the “culture of the self” notion
of soteria, ‘salvation, protecting life’. The difference between
these two concepts of weisheng can be a useful orienting device for
examining epidemiologic practices beyond the modern metric of
population health. As with Canguilhem, it does not ignore health
completely, but proposes a different way of looking at the nature of
life, health, disease and death.