The Unbearable Whiteness of Citational Practice in US Medical Anthropology

Abstract

In this article, we examine the citational practices of US medical anthropology and seek to decenter Western‐centric theory to minimize its theoretical dominance in the field. We call for a robust engagement with a broader variety of texts, genres of evidence, methodologies, and interdisciplinary forms of expertise and epistemology in response to the unbearable whiteness of the citational practices we critique. The practices are unbearable in that they do not support or scaffold the work we need to do as anthropologists. We hope this article invites readers to move in different citational directions to build foundations and epistemologies that support and enrich the capacity for anthropological analysis.

Sacred cites: Engaging the spiritual in ethnographic knowledge (re)production

“…"The academy has traditionally used authorship to create hyper-individualistic hierarchies of knowledge that can be monetized and catalogued according to capitalist and neoliberal measurements" (Smith et al, 2021: 10). The importance of citations in ensuring jobs and job security was recently addressed in publications, specific to the intellectual labor of Black women in anthropology (Smith and Garrett-Scott, 2021) and medical anthropology (Davis and Mulla, 2023), that highlight the importance and impact of particular voices being left out of citations.…”

Teaching and Learning a Joyful Citation Praxis: Affective Relations for Fostering Community Through Our Compositions

“…Scholars (and non-scholars) whose work is excluded from citation or diminished in citation communities have a reduced influence in developing disciplines and transdisciplinary research. Particularly in the first author's home discipline of anthropology, the purportedly "essential" citations are disproportionately written by white men (Bolles 2013, Davis andMulla 2023). Privileging those voices silences and erases the perspectives of those not afforded unearned dominance: "citation is equally a technology for reproducing sameness and excluding difference" (Mott and Cockayne 2017: 960).…”

Reply: Citational Politics and the Future of Posthumanist Archaeologies

“…I thank Sterling and Montgomery for noting this glaring omission in my work and for their insightful diagnoses, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Reckoning with and dismantling the citational politics that maintain whiteness and colonialism in (posthumanist) archaeology is an important task (also see Craven 2021; Davis & Mulla 2023; Smith et al 2021)—one that must be undertaken in tandem with the discipline's increased collaborations with Black studies. Pollock, alternatively, notes that my article did not draw on 1) the works of scholars from western Asia and north Africa and 2) intersectionality and Indigenous studies.…”