Anthropological Research in Public Health Emergencies in India: Current Challenges and Future Opportunities

Abstract

Background The current global pandemic of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) disease and similar kinds of recent diseases like the Ebola virus and Zika virus diseases urge to renovate the recognition of the need to understand social-cultural pathways of disease transmission. The community members’ emic understanding of sudden health crises may help to increase local people's participation in the public healthcare system. Social scientists, particularly anthropologists, have an essential driver in population response to the disease outbreak due to their subjective and objective abilities to assess these events through the lens of the bio-cultural dimension, even in micro-level communities. In the light of interdisciplinary understanding of diseases in public health emergencies, the importance of the anthropological role is growing demand and advocate to perform fruitful research. This paper provides a brief outline of the basic concept of public health emergencies and the involvement of Indian anthropologists so far through global perspectives. This paper also argues the current methodological challenges, policy shortcomings, and future opportunities for anthropological research during disease emergencies in the Indian context. Objective The objective was to find out the community preparedness and response to COVID-19. Methodology For the present study, both secondary and primary data were used. To obtain the secondary data, a specific literature review was done using the key word “Public Health Emergencies”, combined with “Public Health”, “COVID-19”, “Anthropology”, “Preparedness”, “Response”, “Medical Anthropology”, “World Health Organization (WHO)”, “Pandemic”, “Infectious Diseases” and “India” on PubMed and Google Scholar from April 2020 to September 2021. A manual search for relevant materials, and examined articles from several nonacademic sources (e.g. news, websites, etc.) was also used for the analyzing the facts. To obtain primary data, the qualitative survey was carried out in a Santal village, “Majhi Kadamdih”, located in Balarampur block, 35 km southwest of Purulia district town of West Bengal, India. Conclusion There is an insightful connection between anthropological research and public health emergency, specifically in local people’s preparedness and response during sudden health crises. Based on world literature, it was observed that anthropologists substantially contribute to finding out the social-cultural pathways of emergency diseases and interprets the phenomenon in bio-cultural ways.