Race and Health

by

James Doucet-Battle

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 October 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0302

Introduction

This selected bibliography of race and health in anthropology offers a genealogy of scholarship on the topic over the last century and a half. The texts presented reflect conversations emerging from, and concomitant with, 19th- and 20th-century racial science, and its ongoing and contested influence in social, medical, and biological anthropology. Salvage anthropology provided both the validation of Euro-American biological superiority and the presumption that populations most distant from modernity would fall prey to and succumb to disease. As an anthropology of salvage, it would animate eugenicist science and legitimate its political emanations. In effect, financial capital and the biological sciences created self-reinforcing mechanisms that rationalized the global order, the violence of slavery, and the conquest and establishment of the colony. The legacy of this early anthropological research in race and health would permeate 20th-century discourse and practice in both the social and biological sciences until the second quarter of the 21st century. It commences with, threads through, and charts novel and perennial arguments linking race, biology, disease risk, and disparate health outcomes. While the global order has been reconfigured numerous times since 1492, chattel slavery all but abolished, and the postcolony redesigned, racial categories continue to serve as the filters through which research data on human health and disease invariably flow and bioeconomic value generated. Although presented largely from a US-centric perspective, this bibliography and its respective categorical divisions are by no means exhaustive, definitive, or globally diagnostic; it aims to provide a generative grounding for future research, discussion, and cross-disciplinary engagement.

Journals

The subject of race and health has been engaged in journals across disciplines, yet there is no journal in anthropology devoted exclusively to the subject. Marking the long durée of racial science and health over nearly two centuries, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and American Anthropologist have as the disciplinary repositories of record chronicling anthropological preoccupations with race/health nexus. The emerging field of medical anthropology in the late twentieth century saw the appearance of the journals Medical Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. The topical salience of race and health in anthropology has been taken up by minoritized scholars publishing in older journals as well as their establishing journals, such as Transforming Anthropology and the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. These scholarly fora have injected critical voices into ongoing debates about race and health in anthropology.

• American Anthropologist. 1888–.

  The flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, this journal advances the Association’s mission through publishing articles that add to, integrate, synthesize, and interpret anthropological knowledge across disciplinary subfields. The journal extends its mission to shared questions and engagements with the humanities, public health, and the social sciences. Published by the American Anthropological Association and Wiley-Blackwell.

• Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 1901–.

  This is the principal journal of the oldest anthropological organization in the world. It publishes papers aimed at a broad anthropological readership and interest from social anthropology, linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, and archaeology. Published by Wiley-Blackwell.

• Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. 2014–.

  This journal reports on the scholarly progress of work to understand, address, and ultimately eliminate health disparities based on race and ethnicity. Published by Springer on behalf of the W. Montague-Cobb—National Medical Association (NMA) Institute.

• Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness. 1977–.

  This international journal provides a global forum for scholarly articles on the social patterns of ill-health and disease transmission, and experiences of and knowledge about health, illness, and wellbeing. Published by Taylor & Francis.

• Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health. 1983–.

  This international journal publishes research and theory in all areas of medical anthropology. Its primary aim is to stimulate development of theory, methods, and debates in medical anthropology and explore links between medical anthropology and the broader fields of anthropology, the humanities, social sciences, and health-related disciplines. Published by Wiley-Blackwell.

• Transforming Anthropology. 1990–

  The flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, this journal publishes works that reflect the dynamic, transnational, and contested conditions of social worlds to push the boundaries of discipline and genre. Published by the University of Chicago Journals on behalf of the Association of Black Anthropologists.