Negotiating the Role of Anthropological Evidence in Medical Research during Health Emergencies

The 2014–2016 West African Ebola outbreak is often cited as a watershed moment for the social science of epidemics. Anthropologists played a key role in clarifying the social, economic and political dimensions of the epidemic, highlighting both how outbreak control measures were disrupting social practices and how they could be adapted to reflect local realities and experiences. Whilst undoubtedly significant, this narrative of anthropology’s successful integration risks obscuring the fraught position of the anthropologist within the Ebola response. Taking debates about public anthropology and the balance of action and critique as a starting point, we offer reflexive considerations from our work in the Ebola vaccine trials in Sierra Leone. We look at the involvement of social scientists in HIV clinical trials, which led to the inclusion of a social science component in the Ebola trials, through to the everyday discussions on how to integrate ethnographic insights into the running of operations. In so doing, we highlight the importance of foregrounding participants’ and communities’ voices, and confront what gets lost in translation. Keeping this tension in focus, we consider the consequences of this complex position for the possibility of a ‘critically embedded’ anthropology of clinical research in health emergencies.