The Unbearable Whiteness of Citational Practice in US Medical Anthropology

In this article, we examine the citational practices of US medical anthropology and seek to decenter Western-centric theory to minimize its theoretical dominance in the field. We call for a robust engagement with a broader variety of texts, genres of evidence, methodologies, and interdisciplinary forms of expertise and epistemology in response to the unbearable whiteness of the citational practices we critique. The practices are unbearable in that they do not support or scaffold the work we need to do as anthropologists. We hope this article invites readers to move in different citational directions to build foundations and epistemologies that support and enrich the capacity for anthropological analysis.