23. Ebola Outbreak – From the American Anthropological Association

Activity

Please watch the video ‘2015 AAA Invited Session: Are we Anthropologists’ from the American Anthropological Association and answer the quiz below. The video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtykGNAxB9U Links to an external site.

Introduction

Humanitarian agencies without doubt recognise that anthropological knowledge can translate across boundaries and be part of larger world of knowledge production. The outbreak of Ebola made possible to convey ethnographic facts of culture, disciplines and communities of practice to humanitarian and medical responders in the affected regions. The knowledge of anthropologists and their work with humanitarian interventions was certainly much more relevant in the Ebola outbreak than in any other case before. The knowledge of community resistance revealed how much power relationships play a role to defining categories, events, actions and activities as reactions to the events to which maybe anthropological knowledge can contribute.

As a result, a platform was formed the UK based Ebola Response Anthropology Platform (http://www.ebola-anthropology.net/ Links to an external site.) but documents and studies can be found also on the American Anthropological Association (http://www.americananthro.org/ Links to an external site.) and the Francophone SHS Ebola Network (Reseau Ouest Africain Anthropologie des Epidemies Emergentes) https://shsebola.hypotheses.org/ Links to an external site.. Some of the videos are also available on YouTube.