How do hospitals (continue) to matter to anthropologists?
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Alice Street joined a roundtable on hospitals at the Medical Anthropology Europe Conference (MAE Conference) 2025 in Vienna, organised by Fanny Chabrol and Amina Soulimani.
Summary of the roundtable:
Our current geopolitical moment exacerbates hospitals as condensing socio-economic disparities, emotional distress, and environmental destructions. As much as hospitals are greatly destabilised by budgetary austerity worldwide, and are targeted in conflicts as dramatically shown in the Israeli war on Gaza, they still matter as a key locations for medical care. Anthropologists have long made hospitals one of their favourite field sites, investigating their medical cultures, the assemblage of biomedical technologies and health professionals, within specific political economies and global health (Livingston 2012; Street 2014). Hospitals continue to be intriguing in their multiple instantiations (Chabrol et Kehr 2020) particularly in regards to calls and movements for radical care and radical health with the need to think plasticity of hospital environments, and their non normative qualities of a “queer hospital”(Dalton 2024). Recent projects challenging the “hospital of the future” or the future of hospitals across continents opens plural pathways towards more radical epistemologies and methods to approach care and medicine otherwise (Street 2018; Kehr 2020). This panel invited scholars as well as health professionals and other actors to reflect on novel collaborations and conceptualisations.
Summary of Alice's contribution:
When I carried out ethnography in a public hospital in Papua New Guinea in the early 2000s, my attention was drawn to the more-than-biomedical nature of the institution. I found a busy world of kinship, religious practices, labour struggle, political spectacle and economic exchange that made it a rich arena in which to explore personhood and social change. But I missed one essential element of any hospital’s everyday life – the disposal of huge volumes of rubbish, most of it plastic, generated from procedures carried out in nearly every hospital space. I am ashamed to say, I never even asked where the waste went. Presumably, there was an on-site incinerator, probably donated by a foreign development agency, but I never saw it. This now embarrassing omission is highlighted by recent research, carried out with collaborators in Sierra Leone, India, Senegal, and the USA, which reveals hospitals to be prolific sites of landfill, burning, and storage of used and unused medical waste, most of it plastic. I reflect on what a focus on hospitals as sites of waste generation and disposal tells us about these places and the relationships they make, taking us beyond a traditional consideration of hospital relationships between health workers and patients, or between state and society, to consider the relationships to soil, air and water that mediate the disposal of waste on hospital grounds. This raises new questions about how we might theorise hospitals as more-than-biomedical places and the damage that hospitals can do to a place.
