Hi Everyone - This is a long blog, so bear with me. Lots of information, please read to the end. Also, please comment! I. Publicity – The SIG meeting announcement never did make it in to the final program as promised, but did appear in the addendum. This publicity was supplemented by postcards distributed by EJS in various places throughout the conference.
II. SIG Chairs’ meeting report – Several items were raised at this year’s meeting, concerning the role of SIGs within the SMA/AAA.
a. As a group, we requested more visibility for SIGS within the Association, more mentions in publications, and more opportunities to appear in published programs etc. Bryan Page, in attendance at the meeting, graciously added a mention about SIGS in his annual tribute song at the SMA Awards meeting.
b. The chairs requested that next year’s coordinator address the scheduling problem that has occurred lately, which places all the SIGS in competition with each other for attendance, by limiting the times during AAA that the SIG business meetings may be held.
c. The SMA announced a planned meeting for 2009 to be held separate from the SfAA this year. The SMA meeting will be held at Yale University (courtesy of Marcia Inhorn) and along with an extraordinary panel of headline speakers, will be accepting papers for presentation. The deadline is April for abstracts.
d. The SMA is requesting that all the SIGS have mission statements completed in the coming year, to be posted on the SMA website.
III. Meeting Minutes (sort of)
a. Attendees included current members Cheryl Ritenbaugh, Hans Baer, Jenn Thompson, Sonya Pritzker and Andy Pham. We were joined by 3 new members interested in joining.
b. Items on the agenda included how to formalize the organizational structure which would enable administrative decisions to be made more quickly.
c. Members were eager to meet and talk to one another about their work, definitions of CAM-IM, and how our SIG relates to the broader field of medical anthropology.
d. Report from Cheryl Ritenbaugh (CR – please amend if needed)
i. Reminder about the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine. The website is http://www.imconsortium.org/ and their annual conference will be held May 12-15. 2009 North American Research Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine: Collaboration to Promote Scientific Discovery & Health.
ii. You also might be interested in the International Society for Complementary Medicine Research. Their website is http://www.iscmr.org/
iii. Although the above organizations are clinical service and research oriented, these are good resources for social scientists interested in the way CAM and IM are constructed and oriented within a biomedical framework. This relationship is continually shifting, and the political economic dynamics continue to evolve with every clinical research trial published.
iv. NCCAM has a new director, who may lead the organization and its funding priorities in a direction which is favorable for social scientists seeking support for their work. More information about the agency and its transition can be found at http://nccam.nih.gov/
IV. Additional Topics
a. Discussion about possible plans for the SMA meeting in Sept. at Yale. Some members felt that we should take this opportunity to showcase the ways that CAM and IM ‘fit’ into medical anthropology by creating an ‘invited’ session to demonstrate the range of topics studied by those of us interested in CAM and IM, and the importance of these topics to anthropology in general.
b. Other suggestions included inviting some of our well-known scholars in the field to constitute a panel of recognizable colleagues who would attract attention to the session and the topics.
c. EJS related a suggestion from associates at the SIG chair’s meeting that one possible way to gain priority at the 2009 AAA meeting in Washington DC next year, would be to create a ‘roundtable’ session, in which actual presentations are very short (5 minutes or so) but the remainder of the session time spent in engaging the panelists and audience in discussion of a topic.
V. Mission Statement
a. Creation of a mission statement (as requested by SMA) drew the most comment and discussion of any topic raised. At the core of this discussion was the question of how our SIG should define itself in relation to medical anthropology in general, since there is no bright line at present that designates a particular topic as being of interest to a CAM-IM researcher, but not to others in M.A., and vice versa.
b. One suggestion, that perhaps we should move away from a ‘narrow’ focus on CAM and IM, and re-define our area of interest as ‘medical pluralism’ was met with another suggestion that the term ‘medical’ was in itself prioritizing biomedicine, and perhaps the term ‘therapeutic pluralism’ is a better descriptor.
c. Other members voiced concern that prioritizing ‘CAM in biomedicine’ excludes a large number of researchers who are doing work in other countries, or outside the framework of biomedicine. One response to this concern was another concern that we avoid ‘exoticizing’ CAM-IM again by placing it in a context of ‘otherness’. This topic looped back again to a discussion of whether studies of CAM-IM are sufficiently different from the whole of medical anthropology to be distinguished as a special area of study.
d. Finally, one suggestion was made that an appropriate position for CAM-IM studies would be to frame research in terms of self, language, power, gender, ideology and agency.
VI. Actionable Items
a. In response to the SMA request to create a mission statement, EJS called to volunteers from the members to create a steering committee for our SIG. In addition to Mary Hallin, who is assigned to the committee, but is in the field at the moment, we now have Sonya Pritzker, Andy Pham who are current members, and Tonya Taylor who joined us recently. The five of us will constitute the steering committee, and our first order of business will be to draft a mission statement, drawn in part from the ‘Statement of Purpose’ already appearing on our website. I anticipate that we will post the draft for review and comments for a period of time before it is finalized.
b. EJS will take responsibility for organizing a panel for the SMA conference in Sept. As of today, I have one volunteered paper. If you are interested or have suggestions on how this should come together, please contact me at esalkeld@ejsalkeld.net