ABSTRACT
A number of disciplines share many of anthropology's goals and methods for research on culture and meaning, at least to some degree. However, none push the centrality of holism and cross-cultural comparison quite so far as anthropology. The chapter examines more directly how anthropological ideas can be applied productively to and in health services. It looks at various definitions of ethnography, comparing traditional or orthodox with contemporary field contexts and demonstrating that the purist take on what counts as ethnographic distracts attention from what counts as anthropologic and, moreover, from the value added by an anthropologically informed approach. Anthropology maintains that research should be an open-ended, iteratively interpretive process. Moreover, it keeps its critical distance; it questions the health services frame of reference rather than simply accepting it as given. Moreover, interdisciplinarity is a prerequisite for most health services research (HSR) and it is definitely required if findings from anthropologically informed HSR are to be broadcast beyond anthropological quarters.
