Recasting the “ethno” in “epidemiology”

Abstract

Collaboration between ethnography and epidemiology has a long and noble history, longer and nobler than most people realize. This article presents the argument that the growing interest in ethnography is, in fact, a way to reestablish nineteenth century epidemiology's concern with host and environment. Ethnography features meaning and context in ways that epidemiology used to, and features them in epistemological as well as methodological ways.