Public secrets in public health: Knowing not to know while making scientific knowledge

Unknown knowns—or "public secrets"—may play an integral part in publicly funded medical science. In one large transnational field research site in Africa, such unknowing pertains to vital material inequalities across the relations of scientific production. These inequalities are open to ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American ethnologist 2013-02, Vol.40 (1), p.13-34
Main Author: GEISSLER, P. W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Africa
Cognitive problems, arts and sciences, folk traditions, folklore
ethics
Ethnology
General studies
ignorance
Inequality
justice
Knowledge
Linguistics
Medical anthropology
Medical research
Political control
Power
Public health
Public knowledge
Research and teaching
Science
Science, Ethics, Humanitarianism
Scientific research
Secret language
Traditional and modern medicine
public health
Traditional sciences and medicine
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Summary:Unknown knowns—or "public secrets"—may play an integral part in publicly funded medical science. In one large transnational field research site in Africa, such unknowing pertains to vital material inequalities across the relations of scientific production. These inequalities are open to experience but remain often unacknowledged in public speech and scientific texts. This silence is not usually achieved by suppressing knowledge but through linguistic convention and differentiation between places and moments of knowing and ignorance. Switching between known and unknown according to situation and interlocutor is an important, largely implicit skill that maintains relations necessary to conduct clinical research—linking bodies, lives, institutions, and technologies across differentials of resources, expertise, and power. Unknowing, then, facilitates research; and it shapes the resulting work and perpetuates the political and economic contradictions that pervade the context and the research endeavor itself. Unknowing thus poses a challenge for conventional anthropological modes of critique and engagement.
ISSN:0094-0496
1548-1425
DOI:10.1111/amet.12002