Epidemiologizing Culture: Scaling Chineseness through Narratives of Stigma in New York City

Abstract

Drawing on 18 months of participation on an epidemiological research team and close analysis of in-depth interviews the team conducted with 30 Chinese immigrants to New York City, this article traces a process I call epidemiologizing culture. In producing qualitative interview data from Chinese immigrants at risk for HIV, team members smoothed over individual variation to extract elements thought to be relevant to population-level experiences of "Chinese culture." Relevance was determined based on how closely the experiences of participants mirrored the behavior of a Chinese ideal type. Interviewer and interviewee collaborated in articulating and reproducing homophobic and HIV-phobic discourses associated with Chinese culture while erasing details of lived experience, and conflating race and culture. I conclude that differing epistemic virtues make an epidemiological embrace of contemporary anthropological understandings of culture difficult. A model of "parallel play" may be an alternative approach to interdisciplinary synthesis. [epidemiology, Chinese immigrants, race, culture]

Ethnography and quantification: Insights from epidemiology for Indigenous health equity

“…Ethnographic studies of epidemiology, for example, frequently document how positivism and reductionism shape the production of knowledge in the profession (e.g., DiGiacomo 1999; Shim 2014)—often in order to highlight how racialized and other deeply troubling forms of injustice can result (e.g., Briggs and Mantini‐Briggs 2016; Cerón 2019; Davis 2017; Smith‐Morris 2017; Richardson 2019). Through this lens, epidemiologists often figure as subscribing to, fueling, and/or benefiting from narrowly positivist illusions about numerical data (e.g., Mason 2020). Yet Colvin (2015) and Nichter (in Liebow et al.…”

“…Considering why and how to expand ethnographic inquiry into quantification also has implications for ongoing conversations about how ethnographers relate to members of quantitative professions. Many of us appreciate just how often multidisciplinary spaces can end up being fraught for ethnographers, as Mason (2020) compellingly documents, and also recognize the globalizing pressures to overstate similarities between how anthropologists and other professionals approach the same topic, as Yates‐Doerr (2019) thoughtfully assesses. Yet efforts to address these complexities can benefit from lessons from critical and postpositivist approaches to quantitative and other technoscientific work, given how these chart out alternative ways to encounter and manage hierarchy and difference.…”

“…Ethnographers are paying close attention to how “evidence‐based” trends are reconfiguring knowledge politics on a global scale. A number of them highlight how these reconfigurations privilege quantitative measures, metrics, and indicators in discussions about how to understand problems, develop policy, and implement interventions (e.g., Adams 2016; Biehl and Petryna 2013; Biruk 2018; Brives, Le Marcis, and Sanabria 2016; Erikson 2012; Mason 2020; Merry 2016; Nguyen 2009; Storeng and Béhague 2014). These analyses recognize how these latest forms of privileging quantitative ways of knowing build on the continuing cultural investments in uncritical positivism—both within many scientific fields and among their audiences.…”