ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter explores a tension in the way that medical sociology has engaged with questions of race and ethnicity. On the one hand, it has studied aspects of the health of groups in the population defined according to some notion of their race or ethnicity and accordingly produced a diverse and intriguing body of empirical findings. On the other, it has drawn upon sociological theory to criticise the very basis upon which categories like race and ethnicity have come to be defined. The result, as I shall argue, is an unfortunate and unproductive divergence between theory and empirical research which urgently needs to be transcended. This is no easy task, and I do not claim to have achieved it here. However, I hope to indicate some directions in which our efforts may usefully proceed. In particular, I shall oppose the essentially negative critique of race and ethnicity as ‘ideological’ categories, arguing that sociological theory contains more productive ways of addressing the concept of ideology. I draw upon the work of the influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in order to articulate this argument in such a way that a theoretically plausible field of ‘race and health’ research can be defined, and I conclude with some tentative suggestions for theoretically informed empirical work of this kind.
