title: Locating difference: A medical anthropology 'at home'?
abstract: Although medical anthropologists have been doing research in Western societies for at least two decades, such research has only recently been labelled 'at home'. This paper investigates the usefulness of 'at home' as a programmatic concept for medical anthropology. Some of the developments regarding the heightened concern with Western societies and the prominent 'we-others' dualism in general social/cultural anthropology and medical anthropology since the beginning of the 1980s are outlined. By employing Henrietta Moore's ideas about 'difference between ' and 'difference within ', it is shown that 'at home ', as a relational term, gets its meanings in relation to its counterparts, most prominently 'abroad', and that it is based on the problematic 'we-others' dualism. The paper concludes that 'at home' is an unfavourable starting point for conceptualizing medical anthropological research in Western settings. Instead, in order to avoid the trap of reifying differences between 'we' and 'others', we rather need to take up positions of enquiry from which such categories can emerge as 'differences within '.
authors: a Institute of the History of Medicine , University of Vienna , Rosaliagasse 5/9 , Vienna , A-1120 , Austria Phone: Fax: E-mail: a8605089@unet.univie.ac.at.
authors: B
authors: B
authors: Hadolt