Article ID: CBB001320698

Public Secrets in Public Health: Knowing Not to Know while Making Scientific Knowledge (2013)

unapi

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.

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Authors & Contributors
Yahya Shamekhi
Justin J. W. Powell
Yuan Chih Fu
David P. Baker
Jonathan M. Berman
Jennifer Dusdal
Concepts
Public health
Public understanding of medicine
Medicine and politics
Medicine and economics
Health care
Research
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Botswana
Americas
Germany
France
Institutions
UNICEF
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
France. Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale
World Bank
World Health Organization (WHO)
National Institute of Health (U.S.)
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