Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Social Science & Medicine journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/socscimed The field of medical anthropology in Social Science & Medicine Catherine Panter-Brick * , Mark Eggerman Yale University, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Interdisciplinary Medical anthropology Theory Ethnography Biology Health ABSTRACT Conceptually and methodologically, medical anthropology is well-positioned to support a “big-tent” research agenda on health and society. It fosters approaches to social and structural models of health and wellbeing in ways that are critically reflective, cross-cultural, people-centered, and transdisciplinary. In this review article, we showcase these four main characteristics of the field, as featured in Social Science & Medicine over the last fifty years, highlighting their relevance for an international and interdisciplinary readership. First, the practice of critical inquiry in ethnographies of health offers a deep appreciation of sociocultural viewpoints when recording and interpreting lived experiences and contested social worlds. Second, medical anthropology champions cross- cultural breadth: it makes explicit local understandings of health experiences across different settings, using a fine-grained, comparative approach to develop a stronger global platform for the analysis of health-related concerns. Third, in offering people-centered views of the world, anthropology extends the reach of critical en- quiry to the lived experiences of hard-to-reach population groups, their structural vulnerabilities, and social agency. Finally, in developing research at the nexus of cultures, societies, biologies, and health, medical an- thropologists generate new, transdisciplinary conversations on the body, mind, person, community, environ- ment, prevention, and therapy. As featured in this journal, scholarly contributions in medical anthropology seek to debate human health and wellbeing from many angles, pushing forward methodology, social theory, and health-related practice. 1. A big-tent research agenda One of the most elegant characterizations of anthropology describes it as the most scientific of the humanities, the most humanist of the sciences. This phrase encapsulates the unique balancing act that anthropology, in espousing a holistic approach, plays in the generation of knowledge pertaining to human beings. Over 50 years ago, this memorable phrase was quoted by Eric Wolf to contend that anthropology is “less subject matter than a bond between subject matters. It is in part history, part literature; in part natural science, part social science” (Wolf, 1964) (p.88). Wolf denounced the narrowness of scholarly endeavors that banished and brandished certain disciplinary perspectives as unworthy or worthy of scholarly attention. However, disciplinary battles seldom die a good death in scholarly circles. They were drawn in 2010, for example, at the American Anthropological Association meetings with a controversy focused on the place of science within anthropology: strong views were expressed regarding whether the field should define itself as encompassing both evidence-based science and humanistic approaches, pitting scientific data against interpretive insights. Others fought for the banner of holism, advocating the return of a ‘big-tent’ anthropology (Antrosio, 2011). As the controversy played out in scholarly publications, one Editor-in-Chief would argue that “journals should not serve a gate- keeping function in disciplinary debates” (Boellstroff, 2011): they should publish the best scholarship relevant to the field, without ex- pecting authors to strive for broader appeal beyond their sub-dis- ciplines. By contrast, Social Science & Medicine makes a conscious effort to encourage interdisciplinary appeal. It strives to nurture inter- disciplinary engagement in health matters, knitting together health research with implications for policy and practice. This brings us to medical anthropology per se,a field of knowledge explicitly represented in flagship international journals such as Social Science & Medicine, Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Anthropology & Medicine, and Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. Here we find that ori- ginality, quality, and depth of scholarship will serve to both advance social theory within the field and generate vigorous cross-disciplinary conversations. One of the founding editors of Social Science & Medicine, Charles Leslie, is remembered as a strategic “catalyzer” of scholarly contributions across disciplines (DelVecchio Good, 2010). In his role as senior editor espousing a vision of medical anthropology with global and interdisciplinary significance, Leslie did not shy away from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.10.033 Received 29 August 2017; Received in revised form 24 October 2017; Accepted 30 October 2017 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: medanthro.ssm@yale.edu (C. Panter-Brick). Social Science & Medicine 196 (2018) 233–239 Available online 31 October 2017 0277-9536/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T