In his plenary session entitled Five Questions on the Future, Harvard anthropologist Arthur Kleinman capitalized on the 2009 Society for Medical Anthropology Conference's theme of Medical Anthropology at the Intersections to speculate on the future of the discipline.

My job here is to comment on Eldar Shafir’s paper, “Context, conflict, weights, and identities: Some psychological aspects of decision making”. Being an anthropologist interested in the evolution of human behavior, I have little to add to the substance. As a result, any comments I might make be things like, “great paper,” “learned a lot”, etc. I don’t think this kind of commentary would be good...

The relationship between the ethnographic text and cultural background of the anthropologist hailing from a culture different than the people he studied has already been well discussed in the wide range of anthropological literature. This paper explores the relationship between ethnographic text and the native anthropologist that has seldom been discussed so far. The paper also discusses the pr...

Fieldwork on a commercial farm in southern Zambia, which was aimed at designing an HIV prevention program for farm workers, gradually exposed the nature of sexual liaisons between young girls, coming to work on the farm from the surrounding villages, and older migrant men workers. Before completing fieldwork, the anthropologist voiced her concern about the implications of these liaisons for the...