Medical anthropologists address issues related to the cultural, social, structural, and other contextual factors that affect the meaning of health and wellness, beliefs on treatment as well as health access and intervention approaches. One area that has been almost completely overlooked by medical anthropologists is oral health. Oral health is understood to affect general health in multiple ways across the lifespan. The WHO has reported that almost half of the world’s population has experienced oral disease (GBD 2018), and that such diseases share many risk factors with other major communicable diseases (UN General Assembly 2011). Similar to analyses of other forms of healthcare, studying the distribution of oral disease illuminates the differential effects that access to preventive care, dental treatments, and ability to pay for care manifest in communities worldwide. The same frameworks, questions and approaches anthropologists use in research on other areas of physical and mental health should be applied to oral health research and practice. Questions of truth related to illness and wellness, and differential trust in varied sources of knowledge, oral health rituals and behaviors and institutional dental care are pervasive, affecting individual decisions and institutional provider practices. Often these questions are rooted in structural inequities that distribute information and dental care unevenly. Answers to these questions are central to the responsibility of researchers to capture the consequences of such injustices and to promote the creation of policies for the just distribution of oral health care resources. Anthropologists’ research on oral health across the lifespan needs to address meanings and practices over oral health and hygiene, facilitators to oral health treatments, constraints in obtaining treatment, and the development of preventive interventions. This session will highlight the work of a number of researchers using anthropological approaches to oral health topics, with implications for policy and practice. Raskin’s paper examines how dental workforce reforms enacted to increase the number of providers who can deliver preventive services to historically marginalized populations in Virginia, among other states, have instead created new patient exclusions and reproduced existing dental team hierarchies. Schensul’s paper describes a collaborative approach to creating culturally appropriate oral health education materials that integrate scientific knowledge and oral health wisdom of multiethnic older adults living in subsidized senior housing for intervention development. Cruz’s paper analyzes trust in parent-dentist relationships vis-a-vis topical fluoride hesitancy and the impact of history, ‘choice’, and motive have on preventive therapy decision-making. Her's research explores the integrative oral health approaches in the California Central Valley Hmong community and how historical and cultural perspectives of pain and biomedical dental care influence care-seeking preferences. Hoeft’s paper explores the sharing and transfer of responsibility for oral health and illness between providers, parents and children through examining the implementation of an enhanced home care prevention program within a large dental practice in Oregon. The session will end by discussing the previously overlooked opportunity for medical anthropology methods to impact oral health and flag the need for more research to address oral health disparities in the U.S. and globally.

Built to fail: Replicating hierarchies and exclusions through dental team practice reforms

Addressing the Truth and Consequences of Oral Health Disparities Through an Anthropological Lens

technical paper

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Sarah Raskin

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Presentations

Built to fail: Replicating hierarchies and exclusions through dental team practice reforms