By Robert A. Hahn, December 11, 2020, SAPIENS Anthropology Magazine.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the primary agency in the United States that monitors, predicts, and responds to chronic disease, injury, outbreaks, and pandemics, should have social science at its heart. It does not. Despite decades of trying to get the agency to take the social sciences more seriously, and some movement on its part, insights from anthropology, along with other social sciences, have yet to penetrate the soul of the CDC.
I am a medical anthropologist and epidemiologist. I first started working with the CDC back in 1986 and stayed with the agency until my retirement at the end of June 2020. In 1993, I led the founding of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Working Group (BSSWG). This group has worked with CDC leadership to strengthen the employment of social and behavioral scientists at the CDC, sponsor speaker series, and assist CDC staff in addressing social and behavioral science issues, such as ethnographic methods and questionnaire design.
Such platforms exist elsewhere—for example, the U.K.-based Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform, which explores “the political economy, community engagement, and cultural logics, social difference, and vulnerabilities” of emergencies in the realm of health, conflict, and the environment. One of their partners is a research group called Anthrologica, which focuses on applied anthropology to respond to global health issues. But the CDC has not yet run with this idea of a platform.
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