Before and after fieldwork: ingredients for an ethnography of illness

W.H.R. Rivers asked what light anthropology could throw on the emergence of medicine. But this early lead was not soon followed up. Social anthropology had first to establish itself. The new social anthropology championed holistic fieldwork in small-scale societies. Some did choose to study illness or misfortune ethnographically. Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner and Max Marwick provided outstanding models in this field. Political change and decolonisation made some of the older assumptions about the place and aims of anthropological research less easy to sustain. Growth in the subject encouraged specialisation. Medical anthropology was one among many possible developments. But it also had to identify a distinctive focus and place in relation to medicine and other health-related social studies.